CWE-612: Improper Authorization of Index Containing… | Glexia
CWE-612 (Improper Authorization of Index Containing Sensitive Information) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-612: Improper Authorization of Index Containing Sensitive Information
Improper Authorization of Index 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-612 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-612, 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-612: Improper Authorization of Index Containing Sensitive Information
The product creates a search index of private or sensitive documents, but it does not properly limit index access to actors who are authorized to see the original information.
Web sites and other document repositories may apply an indexing routine against a group of private documents to facilitate search. If the index's results are available to parties who do not have access to the documents being indexed, then attackers could obtain portions of the documents by conducting targeted searches and reading the results. The risk is especially dangerous if search results include surrounding text that was not part of the search query. This issue can appear in search engines that are not configured (or implemented) to ignore critical files that should remain hidden; even without permissions to download these files directly, the remote user could read them.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
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.