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Top 10-2017 A3-Sensitive Data Exposure
| Threat Agents / Attack Vectors | Security Weakness | Impacts | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| App Specific | Exploitability: 2 |
Prevalence: 3 |
Detectability: 2 |
Technical: 3 |
Business ? |
| Rather than directly attacking crypto, attackers steal keys, execute man-in-the-middle attacks, or steal clear text data off the server, while in transit, or from the user’s client, e.g. browser. A manual attack is generally required. Previously retrieved password databases could be brute forced by Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). | Over the last few years, this has been the most common impactful attack. The most common flaw is simply not encrypting sensitive data. When crypto is employed, weak key generation and management, and weak algorithm, protocol and cipher usage is common, particularly for weak password hashing storage techniques. For data in transit, server side weaknesses are mainly easy to detect, but hard for data at rest. | Failure frequently compromises all data that should have been protected. Typically, this information includes sensitive personal information (PII) data such as health records, credentials, personal data, and credit cards, which often require protection as defined by laws or regulations such as the EU GDPR or local privacy laws. | |||
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Is the Application Vulnerable?
The first thing is to determine the protection needs of data in transit and at rest. For example, passwords, credit card numbers, health records, personal information and business secrets require extra protection, particularly if that data falls under privacy laws, e.g. EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or regulations, e.g. financial data protection such as PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). For all such data:
See ASVS Crypto (V7), Data Protection (V9) and SSL/TLS (V10). |
How to Prevent
Do the following, at a minimum, and consult the references:
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Example Attack Scenarios
Scenario #1: An application encrypts credit card numbers in a database using automatic database encryption. However, this data is automatically decrypted when retrieved, allowing an SQL injection flaw to retrieve credit card numbers in clear text. Scenario #2: A site doesn't use or enforce TLS for all pages or supports weak encryption. An attacker monitors network traffic (e.g. at an insecure wireless network), downgrades connections from HTTPS to HTTP, intercepts requests, and steals the user's session cookie. The attacker then replays this cookie and hijacks the user's (authenticated) session, accessing or modifying the user's private data. Instead of the above they could alter all transported data, e.g. the recipient of a money transfer. Scenario #3: The password database uses unsalted or simple hashes to store everyone's passwords. A file upload flaw allows an attacker to retrieve the password database. All the unsalted hashes can be exposed with a rainbow table of pre-calculated hashes. Hashes generated by simple or fast hash functions may be cracked by GPUs, even if they were salted. |
References
OWASP
External
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