Weakness · High
CWE-256: Plaintext Storage of a Password
What it is
The product stores a password in plaintext within resources such as memory or files.
- Severity (our rating)
- High
- Likelihood of exploit
- High
- Introduced during
- Architecture and Design
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
What an attacker can do
- Gain Privileges or Assume Identity (Access Control)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Avoid storing passwords in easily accessible locations.
- Consider storing cryptographic hashes of passwords as an alternative to storing in plaintext.
General
- A programmer might attempt to remedy the password management problem by obscuring the password with an encoding function, such as base 64 encoding, but this effort does not adequately protect the password because the encoding can be detected and decoded easily.
How to find it
- 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.)
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.