CWE-538: Insertion of Sensitive Information into Externally-Accessible File or Directory
Official CWE-538 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-538: Insertion of Sensitive Information into Externally-Accessible File or Directory
Insertion of Sensitive Information into Externally-Accessible File or Directory represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality: Read Files or Directories
Developer Pattern
CWE-538 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-538, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-538: Insertion of Sensitive Information into Externally-Accessible File or Directory
The product places sensitive information into files or directories that are accessible to actors who are allowed to have access to the files, but not to the sensitive information.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the following code snippet, a user's full name and credit card number are written to a log file.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design,Operation,System Configuration: Do not expose file and directory information to the user.
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.