Weakness · Medium
CWE-315: Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in a Cookie
What it is
The product stores sensitive information in cleartext in a cookie.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Architecture and Design
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
Attackers can use widely-available tools to view the cookie and read the sensitive information. Even if the information is encoded in a way that is not human-readable, certain techniques could determine which encoding is being used, then decode the information.
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.
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.