Zulip is an open source team chat application. A weekly cron job (added in 50256f48314250978f521ef439cafa704e056539) demotes channels to being inactive after they have not received traffic for 180 days. However, upon doing so, an event was sent to all users in the organization, not just users in the channel. This event contained the name of the private channel. Similarly, the same commit (50256f48314250978f521ef439cafa704e056539) added functionality to notify clients when channels stopped being inactive. The first message sent to a private channel which had not previously had any messages for over 180 days (and were thus already marked inactive) would leak an event to all users in the organization; this event also contained the name of the private channel. Commits 75be449d456d29fef27e9d1828bafa30174284b4 and a2a1a7f8d152296c8966f1380872c0ac69e5c87e fixed the issue. This vulnerability only existed in main, and was not part of any published versions.
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.