CWE-539: Use of Persistent Cookies Containing Sensitive… | Glexia
CWE-539 (Use of Persistent Cookies Containing Sensitive Information) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-539: Use of Persistent Cookies Containing Sensitive Information
Use of Persistent Cookies 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-539 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-539, 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-539: Use of Persistent Cookies Containing Sensitive Information
The web application uses persistent cookies, but the cookies contain sensitive information.
Cookies are small bits of data that are sent by the web application but stored locally in the browser. This lets the application use the cookie to pass information between pages and store variable information. The web application controls what information is stored in a cookie and how it is used. Typical types of information stored in cookies are session identifiers, personalization and customization information, and in rare cases even usernames to enable automated logins. There are two different types of cookies: session cookies and persistent cookies. Session cookies just live in the browser's memory and are not stored anywhere, but persistent cookies are stored on the browser's hard drive. This can cause security and privacy issues depending on the information stored in the cookie and how it is accessed.
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: Do not store sensitive information in persistent cookies.
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
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.