SQ14102

Detected Windows executable files that do not implement the DEP vulnerability mitigation protection.

priority	CI/CD status	severity	effort	RL level	RL assessment
	pass	high	low	None	hardening: warning Reason: baseline mitigations missing

About the issue

Data Execution Prevention (DEP/NX) is a vulnerability mitigation option that prevents data from being interpreted as code anywhere within the application. This mitigation protects the application stack, heap and other memory data ranges. Executable files that fail to implement this mitigation expose the user to increased risks of malicious code injection.

How to resolve the issue

• It's highly recommended to enable this option for all software components used at security boundaries, or those that process user controlled inputs.

• To enable this mitigation, refer to your programming language linker documentation.

• In Microsoft VisualStudio, you can enable DEP mitigation by setting the linker option /NXCOMPAT to ON.

Incidence statistics

ReversingLabs periodically collects and analyzes the contents of popular software package repositories for threat research purposes.

For every repository, the chart shows the percentage of projects that triggered the software assurance policy. In other words, it shows how many projects were found to have the specific issue described on this page.

The percentages are calculated from the total amount of packages analyzed:

• RubyGems: 174K
• Nuget: 189K
• PyPi: 403K
• NPM: 2.1M

Recommended reading

• What is Data Execution Prevention (DEP)? (External resource - Microsoft)
• Code Injection (External resource - OWASP)