Weakness · Medium

CWE-548: Exposure of Information Through Directory Listing

What it is

The product inappropriately exposes a directory listing with an index of all the resources located inside of the directory.

MITRE CWE 4.19.1

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

What an attacker can do

  • Read Files or Directories (Confidentiality)

How to prevent it

Architecture and Design

  • Recommendations include restricting access to important directories or files by adopting a need to know requirement for both the document and server root, and turning off features such as Automatic Directory Listings that could expose private files and provide information that could be utilized by an attacker when formulating or conducting an attack.

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.)

CWE-548 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.