COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-591

Sensitive Data Storage in Improperly Locked Memory

The product stores sensitive data in memory that is not locked, or that has been incorrectly locked, which might cause the memory to be written to swap files on disk by the virtual memory manager. This can make the data more accessible to external actors.

Soyutlama

Variant

Yapı

Simple

Sömürü İhtimali

Medium

Problemi anla

Problem nedir?

The product stores sensitive data in memory that is not locked, or that has been incorrectly locked, which might cause the memory to be written to swap files on disk by the virtual memory manager. This can make the data more accessible to external actors.

Genişletilmiş açıklama

On Windows systems the VirtualLock function can lock a page of memory to ensure that it will remain present in memory and not be swapped to disk. However, on older versions of Windows, such as 95, 98, or Me, the VirtualLock() function is only a stub and provides no protection. On POSIX systems the mlock() call ensures that a page will stay resident in memory but does not guarantee that the page will not appear in the swap. Therefore, it is unsuitable for use as a protection mechanism for sensitive data. Some platforms, in particular Linux, do make the guarantee that the page will not be swapped, but this is non-standard and is not portable. Calls to mlock() also require supervisor privilege. Return values for both of these calls must be checked to ensure that the lock operation was actually successful.

Kök neden

Problem nasıl ve ne zaman oluşur?

Yaşam döngüsü evresi

Implementation

Risk

Başarılı sömürü neye yol açar?

Read Application DataRead Memory

Etkilenen güvenlik alanları: Confidentiality

Sensitive data that is written to a swap file may be exposed.

Savunma

Nasıl önlenir ve çözülür?

Architecture and Design

Mimari ve tasarım yaklaşımı

Detay
Identify data that needs to be protected from swapping and choose platform-appropriate protection mechanisms.

Implementation

Uygulama aşaması savunması

Detay
Check return values to ensure locking operations are successful.