Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Debugging Code

Description

When debugging, it may be necessary to report detailed information to the programmer. However, if the debugging code is not disabled when the product is operating in a production environment, then this sensitive information may be exposed to attackers.

Demonstrations

The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.

Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.

Example One

The following program changes its behavior based on a debug flag.

<% if (Boolean.getBoolean("debugEnabled")) {

  %>
  User account number: <%= acctNo %>
  <%
  } %>

The code writes sensitive debug information to the client browser if the "debugEnabled" flag is set to true .

See Also