CWE-488: Exposure of Data Element to Wrong Session | Glexia
CWE-488 (Exposure of Data Element to Wrong Session) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-488: Exposure of Data Element to Wrong Session
Exposure of Data Element to Wrong Session 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-488 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-488, 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-488: Exposure of Data Element to Wrong Session
The product does not sufficiently enforce boundaries between the states of different sessions, causing data to be provided to, or used by, the wrong session.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following Servlet stores the value of a request parameter in a member field and then later echoes the parameter value to the response output stream. While this code will work perfectly in a single-user environment, if two users access the Servlet at approximately the same time, it is possible for the two request handler threads to interleave in the following way: Thread 1: assign "Dick" to name Thread 2: assign "Jane" to name Thread 1: print "Jane, thanks for visiting!" Thread 2: print "Jane, thanks for visiting!" Thereby showing the first user the second user's name.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Protect the application's sessions from information leakage. Make sure that a session's data is not used or visible by other sessions.
- Testing: Use a static analysis tool to scan the code for information leakage vulnerabilities (e.g. Singleton Member Field).
- Architecture and Design: In a multithreading environment, storing user data in Servlet member fields introduces a data access race condition. Do not use member fields to store information in the Servlet.
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.