Weakness · Medium
CWE-766: Critical Data Element Declared Public
What it is
The product declares a critical variable, field, or member to be public when intended security policy requires it to be private.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
This issue makes it more difficult to maintain the product, which indirectly affects security by making it more difficult or time-consuming to find and/or fix vulnerabilities. It also might make it easier to introduce vulnerabilities.
What an attacker can do
- Read Application Data (Integrity, Confidentiality)
- Modify Application Data (Integrity, Confidentiality)
- Reduce Maintainability (Other)
How to prevent it
Implementation
- Data should be private, static, and final whenever possible. This will assure that your code is protected by instantiating early, preventing access, and preventing tampering.
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.