CWE-359: Exposure of Private Personal Information to an Unauthorized Actor

The product does not properly prevent a person's private, personal information from being accessed by actors who either (1) are not explicitly authorized to access the information or (2) do not have the implicit consent of the person about whom the information is collected.

Consequences

• Confidentiality: Read Application Data

How to prevent it

• Requirements: Identify and consult all relevant regulations for personal privacy. An organization may be required to comply with certain federal and state regulations, depending on its location, the type of business it conducts, and the nature of any private data it handles. Regulations may include Safe Harbor Privacy Framework [REF-340], Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA) [REF-341], Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) [REF-342], General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [REF-1047], California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) [REF-1048], and others.
• Architecture and Design: Carefully evaluate how secure design may interfere with privacy, and vice versa. Security and privacy concerns often seem to compete with each other. From a security perspective, all important operations should be recorded so that any anomalous activity can later be identified. However, when private data is involved, this practice can in fact create risk. Although there are many ways in which private data can be handled unsafely, a common risk stems from misplaced trust. Programmers often trust the operating environment in which a program runs, and therefore believe that it is acceptable store private information on the file system, in the registry, or in other locally-controlled resources. However, even if access to certain resources is restricted, this does not guarantee that the individuals who do have access can be trusted.
• Implementation, Operation: Some tools can automatically analyze documents to redact, strip, or "sanitize" private information, although some human review might be necessary. Tools may vary in terms of which document formats can be processed. When calling an external program to automatically generate or convert documents, invoke the program with any available options that avoid generating sensitive metadata. Some formats have well-defined fields that could contain private data, such as Exchangeable image file format (Exif), which can contain potentially sensitive metadata such as geolocation, date, and time [REF-1515] [REF-1516].

Recent advisories

• GHSA-q423-49rw-g9mh — Gitea: GHSA-8fwc-qjw5-rvgp ClearRepoWatches fix not applied to API EditRepo path — sister code path retains stale watches on public->private
• GHSA-vjc7-jrh9-9j86 — 9router has unauthenticated CRUD on /api/providers and Full API Key Leak via /api/usage/stats
• GHSA-w9xh-5f39-vq89 — phpMyFAQ: Missing Password Reset Token Allows Account Takeover via Username/Email Enumeration
• GHSA-xh32-c9wx-phrp — Keycloak: Information disclosure of disabled user attributes via administrative endpoint
• GHSA-7xq4-mwcp-q8fx — Gitea: anonymous user can visit private user's project
• GHSA-8xx5-h6m3-jr33 — Presta Shop vulnerable to email enumeration
• GHSA-57q2-6cp4-9mq3 — XWiki exposes passwords and emails stored in fields not named password/email in xml.vm
• GHSA-r38m-cgpg-qj69 — XWiki leaks password hashes and other accessible password properties
• GHSA-4qqf-9m5c-w2c5 — Weblate exposes personal IP address via e-mail
• GHSA-h83h-77x2-6w6g — Information exposure in microweber
• GHSA-vvp7-r422-rx83 — Unauthenticated user can have information about hidden users on subwikis through uorgsuggest.vm
• GHSA-599v-w48h-rjrm — XWiki Platform Web Templates vulnerable to Missing Authorization, Exposure of Private Personal Information to Unauthorized Actor
• GHSA-r93j-3mmp-px57 — Mattermost Server: initial_load API exposes unnecessary information
• GHSA-97jg-43c9-q6pf — Unauthenticated user can retrieve the list of users through uorgsuggest.vm

All advisories for CWE-359