Weakness · Medium

CWE-214: Invocation of Process Using Visible Sensitive Information

What it is

A process is invoked with sensitive command-line arguments, environment variables, or other elements that can be seen by other processes on the operating system.

MITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating)
Medium
Likelihood of exploit
Not rated by MITRE
Introduced during
Architecture and Design, Implementation, Operation
Exploited in the wild
No CVE in CISA's catalog

In more detail

Many operating systems allow a user to list information about processes that are owned by other users. Other users could see information such as command line arguments or environment variable settings. When this data contains sensitive information such as credentials, it might allow other users to launch an attack against the product or related resources.

What an attacker can do

  • Read Application Data (Confidentiality)

How to prevent it

MITRE lists no specific mitigation for this weakness. Treat it like its parent weaknesses below: validate input, keep the design simple and review the code where it could appear.

CWE-214 on MITRE's CWE site

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Source: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.