COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-318

Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in Executable

The product stores sensitive information in cleartext in an executable.

Abstraction

Variant

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product stores sensitive information in cleartext in an executable.

Extended description

Attackers can reverse engineer binary code to obtain secret data. This is especially easy when the cleartext is plain ASCII. Even if the information is encoded in a way that is not human-readable, certain techniques could determine which encoding is being used, then decode the information.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Read Application Data

Affected security scopes: Confidentiality

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

  • Follow secure coding guidelines for input handling and boundary checking.
  • Enforce strict security reviews and automated static analysis (SAST) checks.