CWE-548: Exposure of Information Through Directory Listing | Glexia
CWE-548 (Exposure of Information Through Directory Listing) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-548: Exposure of Information Through Directory Listing
Exposure of Information Through Directory Listing 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: Exposing the contents of a directory can lead to an attacker gaining access to source code or providing useful information for the attacker to devise exploits, such as creation times of files or any information that may be encoded in file names. The directory listing may also compromise private or confidential data.
Developer Pattern
CWE-548 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-548, 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-548: Exposure of Information Through Directory Listing
The product inappropriately exposes a directory listing with an index of all the resources located inside of the directory.
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,System Configuration: Recommendations include restricting access to important directories or files by adopting a need to know requirement for both the document and server root, and turning off features such as Automatic Directory Listings that could expose private files and provide information that could be utilized by an attacker when formulating or conducting an attack.
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.