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Weakness · Medium

CWE-552: Files or Directories Accessible to External Parties

What it is

The product makes files or directories accessible to unauthorized actors, even though they should not be.

3 exploited in the wildMITRE 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
3 known exploited CVEs

In more detail

Web servers, FTP servers, and similar servers may store a set of files underneath a "root" directory that is accessible to the server's users. Applications may store sensitive files underneath this root without also using access control to limit which users may request those files, if any. Alternately, an application might package multiple files or directories into an archive file (e.g., ZIP or tar), but the application might not exclude sensitive files that are underneath those directories. In cloud technologies and containers, this weakness might present itself in the form of misconfigured storage accounts that can be read or written by a public or anonymous user.

What an attacker can do

  • Read Files or Directories (Confidentiality, Integrity)
  • Modify Files or Directories (Confidentiality, Integrity)

How to prevent it

Implementation

  • When storing data in the cloud (e.g., S3 buckets, Azure blobs, Google Cloud Storage, etc.), use the provider's controls to disable public access.

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-552 on MITRE's CWE site

Exploited in the wild: 3 CVEs

Vulnerabilities caused by CWE-552 that attackers have used, from CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, newest first.

All known exploited vulnerabilities

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