Description

HCL AION is affected by a vulnerability where pages served over HTTPS could be cached by the browser or intermediate proxies. Sensitive information in cached responses may be retrieved by an unauthorized user with access to the cache, potentially resulting in unintended behavior or security impact under certain conditions.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "3.7",
  "pubDate": "2026-11-06T14:17:12.483Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-11-06T14:17:12.483Z",
  "executiveSummary": "HCL AION is susceptible to an improper caching vulnerability where sensitive data transmitted via HTTPS is incorrectly cached by web browsers or intermediate proxy servers.\nThis vulnerability stems from insufficient or absent HTTP caching headers (such as Cache-Control or Pragma) in the application's responses, which leads to the persistence of sensitive content in local or shared storage.\nThe primary impact involves the potential exposure of sensitive information to unauthorized actors who have physical or logical access to the caching mechanism, such as shared workstations or compromised proxy logs.\nAn attacker does not necessarily require direct network-level access to the victim's session; instead, they exploit the residual data left behind by the application in the client's or proxy's cache.\nThe risk implication is significant as it undermines the confidentiality of HTTPS sessions, potentially leading to the disclosure of PII, session tokens, or internal application state.\nExploitation is passive, requiring only that the victim interacts with the application, after which the attacker accesses the stored cache entries. No specific authentication is required by the attacker to extract the information once they have gained access to the cache storage location.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability resides in the HTTP response header configuration of HCL AION. When the application serves pages over HTTPS, it fails to implement strict caching directives, allowing intermediate caches and browser-based cache stores to retain the HTTP response body.\nThe root cause is the omission of standardized security headers such as 'Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate', 'Pragma: no-cache', and 'Expires: 0'. Without these directives, the browser's default behavior is to adhere to heuristic caching policies, which frequently result in the storage of sensitive pages on the underlying disk or memory.\nThe attack flow follows a sequential pattern. First, an authenticated user accesses sensitive data within the HCL AION interface over an HTTPS connection. The web server transmits the page content without explicitly instructing the client or intermediaries to prevent caching.\nSecond, the client browser or a transparent proxy infrastructure intercepts this content and writes it to the local cache storage. Third, an unauthorized actor—either a user of a shared machine or an administrator of an intermediate proxy—accesses these cache files. Since the data remains in plain text within the cache, the attacker can extract sensitive information, such as user session data, personal information, or proprietary business logic, by simply parsing the cached objects.\nThis vulnerability is particularly critical in environments where HCL AION is accessed from public-facing terminals, shared workstations, or corporate networks utilizing transparent proxies that aggregate traffic. The lack of cache-control mechanisms effectively bypasses the confidentiality guarantees intended by the use of HTTPS for the delivery of sensitive application content.\nBecause the exposure occurs post-transmission at the storage layer of the end-user device or the proxy, the security of the transport layer (TLS) is rendered moot regarding the persistence of the data. Post-exploitation, the impact is strictly limited to the information contained within the cached responses; however, if these responses contain session identifiers, the attacker may be capable of performing session hijacking or further unauthorized actions within the scope of the HCL AION application.\nThere are no specific privilege requirements for the attacker to read the cache; the capability is defined by the access level to the host machine or proxy infrastructure where the cache is maintained."
}