CWE-612: Improper Authorization of Index Containing Sensitive Information

CWE-612: Improper Authorization of Index Containing Sensitive Information is a Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) entry maintained by MITRE. The product creates a search index of private or sensitive documents, but it does not properly limit index access to actors who are authorized to see the original information. Web sites and other document repositories may apply an indexing routine against a group of private documents to facilitate search. If the index's results are available to parties who do not have access to the documents being indexed, then attackers could obtain portions of the documents by conducting targeted searches and reading the results. The risk is especially dangerous if search results include surrounding text that was not part of the search query. This issue can appear in search engines that are not configured (or implemented) to ignore critical files that should remain hidden; even without permissions to download these files directly, the remote user could read them.

If exploited, CWE-612 (Improper Authorization of Index Containing Sensitive Information) it can compromise Confidentiality, leading to outcomes such as Read Application Data.

CWE-612 commonly affects Not Language-Specific. Note that weaknesses are often language-agnostic patterns, so secure coding practices apply broadly.

MITRE documents real CVEs mapped to CWE-612, including CVE-2022-41918. You can look up the full details of each CVE, including CVSS scores and remediation guidance, on our CVE Lookup tool.

A CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) like CWE-612 describes a category of software weakness — the underlying flaw type. A CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) identifies a specific, real-world vulnerability in a particular product. In short, a CWE is the kind of mistake, and a CVE is an instance of that mistake being found in software.