CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2018-14986

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Dec 28, 2018 | Modified: Feb 14, 2019
CVSS 3.x
7.5
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
5 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

The Leagoo Z5C Android device with a build fingerprint of sp7731c_1h10_32v4_bird:6.0/MRA58K/android.20170629.214736:user/release-keys contains a pre-installed app with a package name of com.android.messaging (versionCode=1000110, versionName=1.0.001, (android.20170630.092853-0)) containing an exported content provider named com.android.messaging.datamodel.MessagingContentProvider. Any app co-located on the device can read the most recent text message from each conversation. That is, for each phone number where the user has either sent or received a text message from, a zero-permission third-party app can obtain the body of the text message, phone number, name of the contact (if it exists), and a timestamp for the most recent text message of each conversation. As the querying of the vulnerable content provider app component can be performed silently in the background, a malicious app can continuously monitor the content provider to see if the current message in each conversation has changed to obtain new text messages.

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
Z5c_firmware Leagoo - -

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