CWE-315: Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in a Cookie
Official CWE-315 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-315: Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in a Cookie
Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in a Cookie represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality: Read Application Data
Developer Pattern
CWE-315 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-315, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-315: Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in a Cookie
The product stores sensitive information in cleartext in a cookie.
Attackers can use widely-available tools to view the cookie and read the sensitive information. Even if the information is encoded in a way that is not human-readable, certain techniques could determine which encoding is being used, then decode the information.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following code excerpt stores a plaintext user account ID in a browser cookie. Because the account ID is in plaintext, the user's account information is exposed if their computer is compromised by an attacker.
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.