OrangeHRM is a comprehensive human resource management (HRM) system. From version 5.0 to 5.7, the application’s recruitment attachment retrieval endpoint does not enforce the required authorization checks before serving candidate files. Even users restricted to ESS-level access, who have no permission to view the Recruitment module, can directly access candidate attachment URLs. When an authenticated request is made to the attachment endpoint, the system validates the session but does not confirm that the requesting user has the necessary recruitment permissions. As a result, any authenticated user can download CVs and other uploaded documents for arbitrary candidates by issuing direct requests to the attachment endpoint, leading to unauthorized exposure of sensitive applicant data. This issue has been patched in version 5.8.
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.