CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-12716

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Jun 25, 2018 | Modified: Nov 07, 2023
CVSS 3.x
4.3
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.0/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
3.3 LOW
AV:A/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

The API service on Google Home and Chromecast devices before mid-July 2018 does not prevent DNS rebinding attacks from reading the scan_results JSON data, which allows remote attackers to determine the physical location of most web browsers by leveraging the presence of one of these devices on its local network, extracting the scan_results bssid fields, and sending these fields in a geolocation/v1/geolocate Google Maps Geolocation API request.

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
Chromecast_firmware Google - -

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