CWE 209

Manual Analysis

This weakness generally requires domain-specific interpretation using manual analysis. However, the number of potential error conditions may be too large to cover completely within limited time constraints.

Effectiveness: High

Automated Analysis

Automated methods may be able to detect certain idioms automatically, such as exposed stack traces or pathnames, but violation of business rules or privacy requirements is not typically feasible.

Effectiveness: Moderate

Phase: Implementation

Ensure that error messages only contain minimal details that are useful to the intended audience, and nobody else. The messages need to strike the balance between being too cryptic and not being cryptic enough. They should not necessarily reveal the methods that were used to determine the error. Such detailed information can help an attacker craft another attack that now will pass through the validation filters.

If errors must be tracked in some detail, capture them in log messages - but consider what could occur if the log messages can be viewed by attackers. Avoid recording highly sensitive information such as passwords in any form. Avoid inconsistent messaging that might accidentally tip off an attacker about internal state, such as whether a username is valid or not.

Phase: Implementation

Handle exceptions internally and do not display errors containing potentially sensitive information to a user.

Phase: Build and Compilation

Debugging information should not make its way into a production release.

Phase: Testing

Identify error conditions that are not likely to occur during normal usage and trigger them. For example, run the program under low memory conditions, run with insufficient privileges or permissions, interrupt a transaction before it is completed, or disable connectivity to basic network services such as DNS. Monitor the software for any unexpected behavior. If you trigger an unhandled exception or similar error that was discovered and handled by the application's environment, it may still indicate unexpected conditions that were not handled by the application itself.

Phase: Testing

Stress-test the software by calling it simultaneously from a large number of threads or processes, and look for evidence of any unexpected behavior. The software's operation may slow down, but it should not become unstable, crash, or generate incorrect results.

Phase: System Configuration

Where available, configure the environment to use less verbose error messages. For example, in PHP, disable the display_errors setting during configuration, or at runtime using the error_reporting() function.

Phase: System Configuration

Create default error pages or messages that do not leak any information.