CWE · MITRE source

CWE-526Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable

Abstraction: Variant · CVEs in our corpus: 20

The product uses an environment variable to store unencrypted sensitive information.

Information stored in an environment variable can be accessible by other processes with the execution context, including child processes that dependencies are executed in, or serverless functions in cloud environments. An environment variable's contents can also be inserted into messages, headers, log files, or other outputs. Often these other dependencies have no need to use the environment variable in question. A weakness that discloses environment variables could expose this information.

Last updated: 20 August 2026 14:15 UTC