In most cases, trust boundaries are violated when a secret is exposed in a source code repository or an uncontrolled deployment environment.
Unintended people who don’t need to know the secret might get access to it. They might then be able to use it to gain unwanted access to associated
services or resources.
The trust issue can be more or less severe depending on the people’s role and entitlement.
What is the potential impact?
Splunk HTTP Event Collector (HEC) tokens allow applications to submit events to a Splunk server for logging. A disclosed HEC token could allow an
attacker to submit fake events to Splunk.
Splunk API tokens allow applications to interact with a Splunk instance. Each token represents a user and carries all of that user’s rights. A
disclosed token could allow an attacker to perform any action on the Splunk instance that the associated user could perform, from querying event data
to administering the Splunk instance or cluster.
Below are some real-world scenarios that illustrate some impacts of an attacker exploiting a disclosed token.
Breach of trust in non-repudiation and disruption of the audit trail
When such a secret is compromised, malicious actors might have the possibility to send malicious event objects, causing discrepancies in the audit
trail. This can make it difficult to trace and verify the sequence of events, impacting the ability to investigate and identify unauthorized or
fraudulent activity.
All in all, this can lead to problems in proving the validity of transactions or actions performed, potentially leading to disputes and legal
complications.
Compromise of sensitive data
If the affected service is used to store or process personally identifiable information or other sensitive data, attackers knowing an
authentication secret could be able to access it. Depending on the type of data that is compromised, it could lead to privacy violations, identity
theft, financial loss, or other negative outcomes.
In most cases, a company suffering a sensitive data compromise will face a reputational loss when the security issue is publicly disclosed.
Application’s security downgrade
A downgrade can happen when the disclosed secret is used to protect security-sensitive assets or features of the application. Depending on the
affected asset or feature, the practical impact can range from a sensitive information leak to a complete takeover of the application, its hosting
server or another linked component.
For example, an application that would disclose a secret used to sign user authentication tokens would be at risk of user identity impersonation.
An attacker accessing the leaked secret could sign session tokens for arbitrary users and take over their privileges and entitlements.
