CWE-224: Obscured Security-relevant Information by… | Glexia
CWE-224 (Obscured Security-relevant Information by Alternate Name) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-224: Obscured Security-relevant Information by Alternate Name
Obscured Security-relevant Information by Alternate Name represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Non-Repudiation Access Control: Hide Activities Gain Privileges or Assume Identity
Developer Pattern
CWE-224 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.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-224, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-224: Obscured Security-relevant Information by Alternate Name
The product records security-relevant information according to an alternate name of the affected entity, instead of the canonical name.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- 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.