CWE-213: Exposure of Sensitive Information Due to Incompatible Policies

Description

The product's intended functionality exposes information to certain actors in accordance with the developer's security policy, but this information is regarded as sensitive according to the intended security policies of other stakeholders such as the product's administrator, users, or others whose information is being processed.

Submission Date :

July 19, 2006, midnight

Modification Date :

2023-06-29 00:00:00+00:00

Organization :

MITRE
Extended Description

When handling information, the developer must consider whether the information is regarded as sensitive by different stakeholders, such as users or administrators. Each stakeholder effectively has its own intended security policy that the product is expected to uphold. When a developer does not treat that information as sensitive, this can introduce a vulnerability that violates the expectations of the product's users.

Example Vulnerable Codes

Example - 1

This code displays some information on a web page.

Social Security Number: <%= ssn %></br>Credit Card Number: <%= ccn %>

The code displays a user's credit card and social security numbers, even though they aren't absolutely necessary.

Related Weaknesses

This table shows the weaknesses and high level categories that are related to this weakness. These relationships are defined to give an overview of the different insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction.

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