CWE-550: Server-generated Error Message Containing… | Glexia
CWE-550 (Server-generated Error Message Containing Sensitive Information) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-550: Server-generated Error Message Containing Sensitive Information
Server-generated Error Message 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-550 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-550, 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-550: Server-generated Error Message Containing Sensitive Information
Certain conditions, such as network failure, will cause a server error message to be displayed.
While error messages in and of themselves are not dangerous, per se, it is what an attacker can glean from them that might cause eventual problems.
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 designing and adding consistent error handling mechanisms which are capable of handling any user input to your web application, providing meaningful detail to end-users, and preventing error messages that might provide information useful to an attacker from being displayed.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.