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?
MapBox secret access tokens are used to authenticate MapBox API calls. Each token is assigned one or more scopes that determine which API calls can
be made using that token.
Below are some real-world scenarios that illustrate some impacts of an attacker exploiting the access token.
Modification of application data
Applications may rely on data that cannot be distributed with the application code. This may be due to the size of the data, or because the data is
regularly updated. This data is downloaded by the application as it is needed.
If an attacker can gain access to an authentication secret, they may be able to alter or delete this application data. This may cause parts of the
application to misbehave or stop working. Maliciously altered data could also contain undesirable content which results in reputational damage.
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.
