COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-612

Improper Authorization of Index Containing Sensitive Information

The product creates a search index of private or sensitive documents, but it does not properly limit index access to actors who are authorized to see the original information.

Abstraction

Base

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product creates a search index of private or sensitive documents, but it does not properly limit index access to actors who are authorized to see the original information.

Extended description

Web sites and other document repositories may apply an indexing routine against a group of private documents to facilitate search. If the index's results are available to parties who do not have access to the documents being indexed, then attackers could obtain portions of the documents by conducting targeted searches and reading the results. The risk is especially dangerous if search results include surrounding text that was not part of the search query. This issue can appear in search engines that are not configured (or implemented) to ignore critical files that should remain hidden; even without permissions to download these files directly, the remote user could read them.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Read Application Data

Affected security scopes: Confidentiality

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

  • Follow secure coding guidelines for input handling and boundary checking.
  • Enforce strict security reviews and automated static analysis (SAST) checks.