OrangeHRM is a comprehensive human resource management (HRM) system. From version 5.0 to 5.7, the interview attachment retrieval endpoint in the Recruitment module serves files based solely on an authenticated session and user-supplied identifiers, without verifying whether the requester has permission to access the associated interview record. Because the server does not perform any recruitment-level authorization checks, an ESS-level user with no access to recruitment workflows can directly request interview attachment URLs and receive the corresponding files. This exposes confidential interview documents—including candidate CVs, evaluations, and supporting files—to unauthorized users. The issue arises from relying on predictable object identifiers and session presence rather than validating the user’s association with the relevant recruitment process. 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.