Heap Inspection Security Vulnerability

Question

I have run my java app against the checkmarx tool for security vulnerability and it is constantly giving an issue - Heap Inspection, for my password field for which I use a character array. It doesnt give any more explanation than just pointing out the declaration of the password field.

private char[] passwordLength;

Could anyone help me out here, what more can I look for resolving this?

Answer 1

Heap Inspection is about sensitive information stored in the machine memory unencrypted, so that if an attacker performs a memory dump (for example, the Heartbleed bug), that information is compromised. Thus, simply holding that information makes it vulnerable.

One can mitigate this by storing such sensitive information in a secured manner, such as a GuardedString object instead of a String or a char array, or encrypting it and scrubbing the original short after.

For more information, see this CWE (describes C/C++ but same relevancy for Java).

Answer 2

See this answer on security.stackexchange.com for the question "Is it more secure to overwrite the value char[] in a String".

TLDR: You can't do much about it.

PS: A that is a sister stackexchange site, I am not copying the answer here (also, it is too long). If a moderator disagrees, fell free to copy/paste it.