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CWE-273

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CWE-273

Improper Check for Dropped Privileges

Base
Incomplete

Description

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.

Common Consequences

Scope

Access Control

Impact

Gain Privileges or Assume Identity

Scope

Access Control
Non-Repudiation

Impact

Gain Privileges or Assume Identity, Hide Activities

Potential 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 separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

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.

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 functions to fail.

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 functions to fail.

Applicable Platforms

Not Language-Specific

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