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SQ14108

Detected Windows executable files that rely on the ineffective ASLR vulnerability mitigation enforcement option.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortRL levelRL assessment
passmediumlowNonehardening: warning
Reason: mitigation effectiveness issues

About the issue​

Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) is a vulnerability mitigation option that forces software components to load on a different memory base address each time they are used. This makes the memory layout unpredictable, and it is therefore harder for malicious code to be reliably injected during application runtime. Although enabling ASLR is an opt-in setting during program linking, some operating system configurations can still enforce its use if the vulnerability mitigation requirements are met. This is possible even if the application hasn't been explicitly marked as ASLR-compatible. While this generally improves security posture, the limitation of ASLR enforcement is that the application load addresses are not truly randomized. In most cases, the application load base is different than the default, but it remains the same for the entire duration of device uptime.

How to resolve the issue​

  • In Microsoft VisualStudio, you should explicitly enable ASLR mitigation by setting the linker option /DYNAMICBASE 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