COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONIncomplete

CWE-526

Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable

The product uses an environment variable to store unencrypted sensitive information.

Abstraction

Variant

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product uses an environment variable to store unencrypted sensitive information.

Extended description

Information stored in an environment variable can be accessible by other processes with the execution context, including child processes that dependencies are executed in, or serverless functions in cloud environments. An environment variable's contents can also be inserted into messages, headers, log files, or other outputs. Often these other dependencies have no need to use the environment variable in question. A weakness that discloses environment variables could expose this information.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Lifecycle phase

Operation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Read Application Data

Affected security scopes: Confidentiality

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Architecture and Design

Architecture and design approach

Detail
Encrypt information stored in the environment variable to protect it from being exposed to an unauthorized user. If encryption is not feasible or is considered too expensive for the business use of the application, then consider using a properly protected configuration file instead of an environment variable. It should be understood that unencrypted information in a config file is also not guaranteed to be protected, but it is still a better choice, because it reduces attack surface related to weaknesses such as CWE-214. In some settings, vaults might be a feasible option for safer data transfer. Users should be notified of the business choice made to not protect the sensitive information through encryption.

Implementation

Implementation-phase defence

Detail
If the environment variable is not necessary for the desired behavior, then remove it entirely, or clear it to an empty value.

Verification

How is it detected?

Automated Static Analysis

High
Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)