Weakness · High
CWE-319: Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information
What it is
The product transmits sensitive or security-critical data in cleartext in a communication channel that can be sniffed by unauthorized actors.
- Severity (our rating)
- High
- Likelihood of exploit
- High
- Introduced during
- Architecture and Design, Operation, System Configuration
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
What an attacker can do
- Read Application Data (Integrity, Confidentiality)
- Modify Files or Directories (Integrity, Confidentiality)
- Other (Integrity, Confidentiality)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Before transmitting, encrypt the data using reliable, confidentiality-protecting cryptographic protocols.
Implementation
- When using web applications with SSL, use SSL for the entire session from login to logout, not just for the initial login page.
- When designing hardware platforms, ensure that approved encryption algorithms (such as those recommended by NIST) protect paths from security critical data to trusted user applications.
Testing
- Use tools and techniques that require manual (human) analysis, such as penetration testing, threat modeling, and interactive tools that allow the tester to record and modify an active session. These may be more effective than strictly automated techniques. This is especially the case with weaknesses that are related to design and business rules.
Operation
- Configure servers to use encrypted channels for communication, which may include SSL or other secure protocols.
How to find it
- Black Box. Use monitoring tools that examine the software's process as it interacts with the operating system and the network. This technique is useful in cases when source code is unavailable, if the software was not developed by you, or if you want to verify that the build phase did not introduce any new weaknesses. Examples include debuggers that directly attach to the running process; system-call tracing utilities such as truss (Solaris) and strace (Linux); system activity monitors such as FileMon, RegMon, Process Monitor, and other Sysinternals utilities (Windows); and sniffers and protocol analyzers that monitor network traffic. Attach the monitor to the process, trigger the feature that sends the data, and look for the presence or absence of common cryptographic functions in the call tree. Monitor the network and determine if the data packets contain readable commands. Tools exist for detecting if certain encodings are in use. If the traffic contains high entropy, this might indicate the usage of encryption.
- 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.