CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2014-9162

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Dec 10, 2014 | Modified: Dec 20, 2018
CVSS 3.x
N/A
Source:
NVD
CVSS 2.x
10 HIGH
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C
RedHat/V2
4.3 MODERATE
AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu
MEDIUM

Adobe Flash Player before 13.0.0.259 and 14.x through 16.x before 16.0.0.235 on Windows and OS X and before 11.2.202.425 on Linux allows attackers to obtain sensitive information via unspecified vectors.

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
Flash_player Adobe 13.0 (including) 13.0.0.259 (excluding)
Flash_player Adobe 14.0 (including) 14.0.0.179 (including)
Flash_player Adobe 16.0 (including) 16.0.0.235 (excluding)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Supplementary RedHat flash-plugin-0:11.2.202.425-1.el5 *
Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 RedHat flash-plugin-0:11.2.202.425-1.el6 *
Adobe-flashplugin Ubuntu lucid *
Adobe-flashplugin Ubuntu precise *
Adobe-flashplugin Ubuntu trusty *
Adobe-flashplugin Ubuntu upstream *
Adobe-flashplugin Ubuntu utopic *
Flashplugin-nonfree Ubuntu devel *
Flashplugin-nonfree Ubuntu lucid *
Flashplugin-nonfree Ubuntu precise *
Flashplugin-nonfree Ubuntu trusty *
Flashplugin-nonfree Ubuntu upstream *
Flashplugin-nonfree Ubuntu utopic *

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