Privacy Violation: Image

Mishandling sensitive information, such as business reports, can compromise corporate privacy and is often illegal.

Privacy violations occur when sensitive data is persisted to disk in an unencrypted format.


Example 1: The following ASPX code instantiates a DataVisualization control that generates a graph of sensitive financial information from the XML Data Source SensitiveXMLData:

        <asp:Chart ID="Chart1" runat="server" ImageLocation="~/Temporary/Graph"
            ImageType="Jpeg" DataSourceID="SensitiveXMLData" ImageStorageMode="UseImageLocation">
            <series>
                .
                .
                .
            </series>
            <chartareas>
                <asp:ChartArea Name="ChartArea1">
                </asp:ChartArea>
            </chartareas>
        </asp:Chart>
  

The code in Example 1 instructs the Chart control to produce a JPEG image of the bar graph and write it to the temporary directory ~/Temporary/Graph. After the control writes the image to disk, the user's browser will make a subsequent request of the file and display it to the user. The image is not written securely to disk. Also, the code assumes that the underlying infrastructure will protect the file from unauthorized access by another user.