CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2011-4872

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Feb 05, 2012 | Modified: Feb 16, 2012
CVSS 3.x
N/A
Source:
NVD
CVSS 2.x
2.6 LOW
AV:N/AC:H/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

Multiple HTC Android devices including Desire HD FRG83D and GRI40, Glacier FRG83, Droid Incredible FRF91, Thunderbolt 4G FRG83D, Sensation Z710e GRI40, Sensation 4G GRI40, Desire S GRI40, EVO 3D GRI40, and EVO 4G GRI40 allow remote attackers to obtain 802.1X Wi-Fi credentials and SSID via a crafted application that uses the android.permission.ACCESS_WIFI_STATE permission to call the toString method on the WifiConfiguration class.

Weakness

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Desire_hd Htc frg83d (including) frg83d (including)
Desire_hd Htc gri40 (including) gri40 (including)
Desire_s Htc gri40 (including) gri40 (including)
Droid_incredible Htc frf91 (including) frf91 (including)
Evo_3d Htc gri40 (including) gri40 (including)
Evo_4g Htc gri40 (including) gri40 (including)
Glacier Htc frg83 (including) frg83 (including)
Sensation_4g Htc gri40 (including) gri40 (including)
Sensation_z710e Htc gri40 (including) gri40 (including)
Thunderbolt_4g Htc frg83d (including) frg83d (including)

Extended Description

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Potential Mitigations

  • Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

References