A vulnerability in Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) polling for Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager, Cisco Secure Email Gateway, and Cisco Secure Web Appliance could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to obtain confidential information about the underlying operating system.
This vulnerability exists because the appliances do not protect confidential information at rest in response to SNMP poll requests. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted SNMP poll request to the affected appliance. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to discover confidential information that should be restricted. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must have the configured SNMP credentials.
The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.
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.