COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-548

Exposure of Information Through Directory Listing

The product inappropriately exposes a directory listing with an index of all the resources located inside of the directory.

Abstraction

Variant

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product inappropriately exposes a directory listing with an index of all the resources located inside of the directory.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Lifecycle phase

Operation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Read Files or Directories

Affected security scopes: Confidentiality

Exposing the contents of a directory can lead to an attacker gaining access to source code or providing useful information for the attacker to devise exploits, such as creation times of files or any information that may be encoded in file names. The directory listing may also compromise private or confidential data.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Architecture and Design · System Configuration

Defence to apply across several lifecycle phases

Detail
Recommendations include restricting access to important directories or files by adopting a need to know requirement for both the document and server root, and turning off features such as Automatic Directory Listings that could expose private files and provide information that could be utilized by an attacker when formulating or conducting an attack.

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.)

MITRE diagram

Weakness relationships and flow

CWE-548 MITRE diagramı
CWE-548: Common Weakness Enumeration Entry CWE-548 · DayBreach Sözlük · DayBreach