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How to Use Tenable.io WAS to Find and Fix Sensitive Information Exposure in Microsoft Power Apps

September 30, 2021 • 6 Min Read
by Rémy Marot
Blog Home / Research

Researchers identified a configuration issue in Microsoft Power Apps portals that exposed millions of records for nearly 50 organizations. Learn how you can use Tenable.io Web App Scanning to identify this configuration issue and prevent the exposure of sensitive information.

Thanks to Satnam Narang from the Security Response Team for his contributions to this blog post.

Background

On August 23, UpGuard Research published a blog post detailing its discovery of the exposure of 38 million records across 47 entities via Microsoft Power Apps portals. Power Apps portals, as Microsoft describes them, allows both internal and external individuals to securely access Microsoft Dataverse data using portals.

According to UpGuard, the Power Apps portals are configured for public access by default, which means anonymous users could access this data. In their research, Upguard found the exposure of personally identifiable information (PII), including COVID-19 related contact tracing and vaccination appointment details, social security numbers, employee IDs, names and addresses and a variety of other sensitive information.

UpGuard disclosed its findings to Microsoft in June. Microsoft responded that the behavior is “considered to be by design” and UpGuard’s case was closed. However, as recent industry data shows, misconfigurations in cloud environments can increase an organization's risk of being breached.

Two-thirds of cloud breaches were due to misconfigurations

IBM’s 2021 X-Force Cloud Security Threat Landscape Report, which analyzed data sets from Q2 2020 through Q2 2021, found that two-thirds of cloud environment breaches could have been prevented if misconfigurations and policies were properly reviewed and addressed. IBM’s findings were centered around improperly configured APIs and virtual machines, but the overarching theme of misconfigurations is also applicable to Power Apps. However, the problem with the Power Apps exposure is that organizations likely did not realize they were exposing this information when UpGuard identified the exposure.

Analysis

As a low-code platform — an environment that supports development via a graphical user interface instead of hand-coding — Microsoft Power Apps allow users to build and publish web pages rendering data from multiple sources using connectors. Among the different application types offered by the platform, Power Apps portals provide a web view which can be accessed by authenticated or anonymous users. By leveraging the concept of lists, a Power Apps user is able to quickly render a set of records from the data source without the need to write code.

The problem with default table permissions in Power Apps

Power Apps portals rely on web roles and table permissions to define the privileges allowed to the different users on a given list, whether they are authenticated or not. By default, table permissions are not applied to lists and need to be explicitly enabled with an option in the list properties: