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Weakness (CWE)

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

Base Incomplete

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.

How to prevent it (3 mitigations)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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].

Source: MITRE CWE-359

All Critical High Medium Low Exploited only Public exploit

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