CWE-524: Use of Cache Containing Sensitive Information | Glexia
CWE-524 (Use of Cache Containing Sensitive Information) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-524: Use of Cache Containing Sensitive Information
Use of Cache Containing Sensitive Information 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-524 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-524, 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-524: Use of Cache Containing Sensitive Information
The code uses a cache that contains sensitive information, but the cache can be read by an actor outside of the intended control sphere.
Applications may use caches to improve efficiency when communicating with remote entities or performing intensive calculations. A cache maintains a pool of objects, threads, connections, pages, financial data, passwords, or other resources to minimize the time it takes to initialize and access these resources. If the cache is accessible to unauthorized actors, attackers can read the cache and obtain this sensitive information.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Protect information stored in cache.
- Architecture and Design: Do not store unnecessarily sensitive information in the cache.
- Architecture and Design: Consider using encryption in the cache.
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.