CWE-223: Omission of Security-relevant Information
Official CWE-223 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-223: Omission of Security-relevant Information
Omission of Security-relevant Information represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Non-Repudiation: Hide Activities: The source of an attack will be difficult or impossible to determine. This can allow attacks to the system to continue without notice.
Developer Pattern
CWE-223 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Confidence
high confidence from CWE-223, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-223: Omission of Security-relevant Information
The product does not record or display information that would be important for identifying the source or nature of an attack, or determining if an action is safe.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This code logs suspicious multiple login attempts. This code only logs failed login attempts when a certain limit is reached. If an attacker knows this limit, they can stop their attack from being discovered by avoiding the limit.
- This code prints the contents of a file if a user has permission. While the code logs a bad access attempt, it logs the user supplied name for the file, not the canonicalized file name. An attacker can obscure their target by giving the script the name of a link to the file they are attempting to access. Also note this code contains a race condition between the is_link() and readlink() functions (CWE-363).
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.