CWE-540: Inclusion of Sensitive Information in Source Code
Official CWE-540 CWE context with Glexia analysis, remediation guidance, related CVEs, and ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take
CWE-540: Inclusion of Sensitive Information in Source Code
Inclusion of Sensitive Information in Source Code 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-540 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-540, 4.20.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-540: Inclusion of Sensitive Information in Source Code
Source code on a web server or repository often contains sensitive information and should generally not be accessible to users.
There are situations where it is critical to remove source code from an area or server. For example, obtaining Perl source code on a system allows an attacker to understand the logic of the script and extract extremely useful information such as code bugs or logins and passwords.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following code uses an include file to store database credentials: database.inc,login.php,If the server does not have an explicit handler set for .inc files it may send the contents of database.inc to an attacker without pre-processing, if the attacker requests the file directly. This will expose the database name and password.
- The following comment, embedded in a JSP, will be displayed in the resulting HTML output.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design,System Configuration: Recommendations include removing this script from the web server and moving it to a location not accessible from the Internet.
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.