The description above is MITRE’s definition of CWE-522 in CWE 4.20, a class-level weakness.
Common consequences MITRE lists
- Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity
Guides on this site
Case study: the LastPass breach (2022)
How an attacker went from a compromised developer laptop to a DevOps engineer's home computer, the keys to LastPass's cloud backups and a copy of customer vaults; why each vault's safety then rested on its master password and PBKDF2 iteration count; and what it teaches about backup keys, privileged endpoints, KDF upgrades and unencrypted metadata.
Case study: the Okta support-system breach and session tokens in HAR files (2023)
How a service account password saved to a personal browser profile let an attacker download customers' HAR files from Okta's support system, replay the session tokens inside them against five customers, and stay unseen for two weeks; and why HAR files are credentials, admin sessions need binding, and every exposed credential must be rotated.
Secrets management: storage, rotation and leaked-secret response
Follow one application credential from issuance through caching, rotation, revocation and restored backups, prove that its old value stops working, and respond correctly when a secret leaks.
Case study: the Shai-Hulud npm worm (2025-2026)
How a self-replicating npm worm turned stolen tokens into hundreds of infected packages in 2025, how its 2026 successors hijacked release pipelines and trusted publishing, what npm and GitHub changed in response, and the publishing, install and response practices that stop it.
Secure the developer workstation: extensions, package managers, secrets and AI agents
Attackers reach the software supply chain through developers' editors, package installs and AI agents. Allow-list extensions, stop install scripts and brand-new versions, keep long-lived secrets off laptops, and lock down repository files that run code when a project opens.
Contain a leaked secret, then investigate and clean up
Revoke an exposed API key, token or private key at its issuer before anything else, end the sessions it minted, check the provider's logs, then remove every copy and replace it with a credential that expires on its own.
Secrets at runtime: Vault, Kubernetes Secrets, CSI driver, External Secrets and SOPS
How a running workload should get its credentials: encrypt Kubernetes Secrets with a KMS v2 provider and lock down RBAC, mount from an external store with the Secrets Store CSI Driver, sync with External Secrets Operator, issue dynamic credentials with Vault and its Agent Injector, keep Git copies encrypted with SOPS, and make rotation reach the process.
Consume third-party APIs safely (OWASP API10:2023)
Treat every upstream and third-party API response as untrusted input: validate it against a schema, set connect and read timeouts, cap the response size, refuse to follow redirects blindly, keep TLS verification on, and scope the credentials you hold for each provider.
Call a hosted LLM API safely
A code-first checklist for wiring up an OpenAI or Anthropic API call from a backend: keep keys server-side, redact PII before prompts and logs, choose provider retention settings deliberately, validate structured output and still treat it as untrusted, and set timeouts, retries and per-user cost caps.
Case study: the Amazon Q Developer extension compromise (2025)
How an over-scoped GitHub token, extracted from an AWS CodeBuild pull request build, let a threat actor commit code to the Amazon Q Developer extension for VS Code that shipped in version 1.84.0 in July 2025, why the injected code aimed at the Q Developer CLI failed, and the CI and AI-agent controls the incident argues for.
Case study: the CircleCI security incident (January 2023)
How a session stolen from one engineer's laptop reached CircleCI's production systems and customers' stored secrets in 2023, and what platform operators and CI users should change.
Practice
- Insecure randomness lab: Generate unguessable API keys · Browser lab
References
This page is generated from MITRE’s CWE 4.20 catalogue (released 30 April 2026) and lists every guide, fix card and lab here that cites CWE-522.
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