CWE-318: Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in Executable
Official CWE-318 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-318: Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in Executable
Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in Executable 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-318 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-318, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-318: Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in Executable
The product stores sensitive information in cleartext in an executable.
Attackers can reverse engineer binary code to obtain secret data. This is especially easy when the cleartext is plain ASCII. 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
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
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.