CWE-200: Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include: private, personal information, such as personal messages, financial data, health records, geographic location, or contact details system status and environment, such as the operating system and installed packages business secrets and intellectual property network status and configuration the product's own code or internal state metadata, e.g. logging of connections or message headers indirect information, such as a discrepancy between two internal operations that can be observed by an outsider Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include: the product's own users people or organizations whose information is created or used by the product, even if they are not direct product users the product's administrators, including the admins of the system(s) and/or networks on which the product operates the developer Information exposures can occur in different ways: the code explicitly inserts sensitive information into resources or messages that are intentionally made accessible to unauthorized actors, but should not contain the information - i.e., the information should have been "scrubbed" or "sanitized" a different weakness or mistake indirectly inserts the sensitive information into resources, such as a web script error revealing the full system path of the program. the code manages resources that intentionally contain sensitive information, but the resources are unintentionally made accessible to unauthorized actors. In this case, the information exposure is resultant - i.e., a different weakness enabled the access to the information in the first place. It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an "information exposure," but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Consequences

• Confidentiality: Read Application Data

How to prevent it

• Architecture and Design: Compartmentalize the system to have "safe" areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area. Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

Recent advisories

• GHSA-j7qq-vr8c-xvw3 — MLflow CrewAI autologging records LLM provider API keys in logged trace spans
• GHSA-gqh3-7856-rjjg — ApostropheCMS: :_id/locales REST route omits the public-API authorization gate its sibling read routes enforce (unauthenticated doc-existence + locale metadata disclosure)
• GHSA-rqgm-cfrp-4hx8 — ApostropheCMS: Unauthenticated publicApiProjection bypass via search and sort query builders in the public REST API
• GHSA-f66c-mpj2-3r8h — ApostropheCMS: POST /api/v1/@apostrophecms/doc/slugTaken discloses existence of private/admin-only content to any authenticated user
• GHSA-vfpm-58rq-9qcg — Vite: First 4 bytes of files outside of `server.fs` setting is exposed by `?vite-wasm-instance`
• GHSA-23mf-xhv8-69c2 — GitPython: arbitrary file read via attacker-controlled branch name in `Head.checkout()` (incomplete fix of CVE-2026-78679)
• GHSA-fx3j-rwgx-fr94 — GitPython: separate_git_dir leaks env vars via crafted .gitmodules submodule name
• GHSA-vp88-798v-h67f — rustls: ECH rejection can expose buffered application data to authenticated outer server before `ech_required` alert
• GHSA-cr65-55v9-xhvv — Dio: Cross-origin redirect leaks sensitive request headers in `dio_http2_adapter`
• GHSA-8wvg-r2j4-3737 — Vikunja: Assignee email addresses disclosed to read-only project members via the task assignees endpoint
• GHSA-3hc7-r24j-rpwc — Vikunja: Cross-project task disclosure through subtask expansion
• GHSA-x2rp-9qf7-2fmq — Contao: Protected page content is disclosed to anonymous visitors after contao.search.index_protected is disabled
• GHSA-32gc-wf3m-78w9 — 0xJacky/nginx-ui /api/nodes Leaks Cluster Node Tokens and Allows Cross-Node Impersonation as initUser
• GHSA-g2v8-7jhw-pp8p — Backstage: Sensitive information exposure in Scaffolder
• GHSA-fwxr-j5w2-587m — LiquidJS: ownPropertyOnly bypass for inherited array indices in first/last/join/reverse/slice/compact, `.first`/`.last`, negative index, and for-loop iteration

All advisories for CWE-200