Secure Error Handling: Stack Trace Leak vs. Sanitized Response

Error Handler Mode

Error rate 15%

Traffic speed 1.0×

Live Stats

Mode: SANITIZED — responses carry a generic message + correlation ID only.

Requests handled

Errors triggered

Secrets leaked

Correlation IDs logged

Exposure score (leak ÷ errors)

How it works

When a request fails inside a service, the handler decides what the caller — and the logs — get to see. Two contracts are simulated here:

Verbose (insecure):
  HTTP 500 { stack: "...", db_url: "postgres://...",
             query: "SELECT * WHERE id=..." }
  → returned straight to the client

Sanitized (secure):
  HTTP 500 { message: "Internal error",
             correlationId: "c7f1-9a2e" }
  → full stack/context written server-side only,
    keyed by correlationId, for support to look up later

The exposure score approximates a real metric: of all errors raised, what fraction returned internal detail (stack traces, connection strings, file paths, query text) to an untrusted caller?

exposure = secretsLeaked / errorsTriggered × 100%

Mode toggle — switches every future error between the verbose and sanitized contract; requests already in flight finish under the mode they started with.
Error rate — probability that a request hitting the Service node fails, independent of the handling mode.
Force error now — guarantees the very next request fails, so you can watch one packet through the whole pipeline.
Correlation ID — a random token stamped on every sanitized error and written to the centralized Log Store, so support can trace a user's "Internal error" report back to the real stack trace without ever exposing it to them.

This is the OWASP-recommended pattern (A09:2021 — Security Logging and Monitoring Failures / improper error handling): never let raw exceptions reach an untrusted client, but never lose the diagnostic detail either — route it to a log store the client can't read.

Normal request/response Sanitized error response Leaked secret (verbose error) Log entry → Log Store

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