CWE-377: Insecure Temporary File | Glexia
CWE-377 (Insecure Temporary File) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-377: Insecure Temporary File
Insecure Temporary File represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality,Integrity: Read Files or Directories,Modify Files or Directories
Developer Pattern
CWE-377 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-377, 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-377: Insecure Temporary File
Creating and using insecure temporary files can leave application and system data vulnerable to attack.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following code uses a temporary file for storing intermediate data gathered from the network before it is processed. This otherwise unremarkable code is vulnerable to a number of different attacks because it relies on an insecure method for creating temporary files. The vulnerabilities introduced by this function and others are described in the following sections. The most egregious security problems related to temporary file creation have occurred on Unix-based operating systems, but Windows applications have parallel risks. This section includes a discussion of temporary file creation on both Unix and Windows systems. Methods and behaviors can vary between systems, but the fundamental risks introduced by each are reasonably constant.
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.