CAPEC Definitions / CAPEC-155

CAPEC-155: Screen Temporary Files for Sensitive Information

An adversary exploits the temporary, insecure storage of information by monitoring the content of files used to store temp data during an application's routine execution flow. Many applications use temporary files to accelerate processing or to provide records of state across multiple executions of the application. Sometimes, however, these temporary files may end up storing sensitive information. By screening an application's temporary files, an adversary might be able to discover such sensitive information. For example, web browsers often cache content to accelerate subsequent lookups. If the content contains sensitive information then the adversary could recover this from the web cache.