COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-779

Logging of Excessive Data

The product logs too much information, making log files hard to process and possibly hindering recovery efforts or forensic analysis after an attack.

Abstraction

Base

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Low

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product logs too much information, making log files hard to process and possibly hindering recovery efforts or forensic analysis after an attack.

Extended description

While logging is a good practice in general, and very high levels of logging are appropriate for debugging stages of development, too much logging in a production environment might hinder a system administrator's ability to detect anomalous conditions. This can provide cover for an attacker while attempting to penetrate a system, clutter the audit trail for forensic analysis, or make it more difficult to debug problems in a production environment.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Operation

REALIZATION: This weakness is caused during implementation of an architectural security tactic.

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU)DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)

Affected security scopes: Availability

Log files can become so large that they consume excessive resources, such as disk and CPU, which can hinder the performance of the system.
Hide Activities

Affected security scopes: Non-Repudiation

Logging too much information can make the log files of less use to forensics analysts and developers when trying to diagnose a problem or recover from an attack.
Hide Activities

Affected security scopes: Non-Repudiation

If system administrators are unable to effectively process log files, attempted attacks may go undetected, possibly leading to eventual system compromise.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Architecture and Design

Architecture and design approach

Detail
Suppress large numbers of duplicate log messages and replace them with periodic summaries. For example, syslog may include an entry that states "last message repeated X times" when recording repeated events.

Architecture and Design

Architecture and design approach

Detail
Support a maximum size for the log file that can be controlled by the administrator. If the maximum size is reached, the admin should be notified. Also, consider reducing functionality of the product. This may result in a denial-of-service to legitimate product users, but it will prevent the product from adversely impacting the entire system.

Implementation

Implementation-phase defence

Detail
Adjust configurations appropriately when the product is transitioned from a debug state to production.

Verification

How is it detected?

Automated Static Analysis

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.)