CWE WEAKNESSES / CWE-273
CWE-273
Improper Check for Dropped Privileges
Base EXPLOIT LIKELIHOOD: MEDIUM
What it is
The product attempts to drop privileges but does not check or incorrectly checks to see if the drop succeeded.
If the drop fails, the product will continue to run with the raised privileges, which might provide additional access to unprivileged users.
Impact
| Access Control | Gain Privileges or Assume Identity |
| Access Control, Non-Repudiation | Gain Privileges or Assume Identity, Hide Activities |
Mitigations
- [Architecture and Design]Compartmentalize the system to have "safe" areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separ
- [Implementation] Check the results of all functions that return a value and verify that the value is expected.
- [Implementation] In Windows, make sure that the process token has the SeImpersonatePrivilege(Microsoft Server 2003). Code that relies on impersonation for security must ensure that the impersonation succeeded, i.e., that a proper privilege demotion happened.
Real-world CVE examples
- CVE-2006-4447 — Program does not check return value when invoking functions to drop privileges, which could leave users with higher privileges than expected by forcing those fu
- CVE-2006-2916 — Program does not check return value when invoking functions to drop privileges, which could leave users with higher privileges than expected by forcing those fu
Related weaknesses
Test & detect
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Source: MITRE CWE. View on cwe.mitre.org →