Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information

Description

Many communication channels can be "sniffed" by attackers during data transmission. For example, network traffic can often be sniffed by any attacker who has access to a network interface. This significantly lowers the difficulty of exploitation by 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 code attempts to establish a connection to a site to communicate sensitive information.

try {
  URL u = new URL("http://www.secret.example.org/");
  HttpURLConnection hu = (HttpURLConnection) u.openConnection();
  hu.setRequestMethod("PUT");
  hu.connect();
  OutputStream os = hu.getOutputStream();
  hu.disconnect();
}
catch (IOException e) {


  //...


}

Though a connection is successfully made, the connection is unencrypted and it is possible that all sensitive data sent to or received from the server will be read by unintended actors.

See Also