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SQ14119

Detected Windows executable files that do not implement the safe exception handling vulnerability mitigation protection.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
passhighlowNonehardening: warning
Reason: baseline mitigations missing

About the issue​

Safe Exception Handling (/SAFESEH) protects the code flow integrity by ensuring that exceptions are handled only by vetted functions. This mitigation protects dynamically constructed exception chains by checking the function targets prior to their execution. Because the code flow integrity is verified during runtime, malicious code is less likely to be able to hijack trusted execution paths. It's highly recommended to enable this option for all software components used at security boundaries, or those that process user controlled inputs. However, this option is only effective on systems that dynamically resolve exception handlers. Most notably, this option is recommended for 32-bit Windows applications that target the Intel x86 platform. Other operating system and platform combinations mitigate exception hijacking risks through the use of statically generated read-only tables.

How to resolve the issue​

  • To enable this mitigation, refer to your programming language toolchain documentation.
  • In Microsoft VisualStudio, you can enable safe exception handling mitigation by passing the /SAFESEH parameter to the linker.

Incidence statistics​

ReversingLabs periodically collects and analyzes the contents of popular software package repositories for threat research purposes. Analysis results are used to calculate incidence statistics for issues (policy violations) that Spectra Assure can detect in software packages.

This section is updated when new data becomes available.

Total amount of packages analyzed

  • RubyGems: 183K
  • Nuget: 644K
  • PyPi: 628K
  • NPM: 3.72M

Total detections per repository

For every repository, the chart shows the number of packages that triggered the software assurance policy. In other words, it shows how many packages in each package repository were found to have the specific issue described on this page. This information helps you understand how common the issue is across different software communities.

If a repository is absent from the chart, that means none of the packages in that repository triggered this policy during analysis, or the policy was not used during analysis.

Distribution of total detections by project popularity

For every repository, the chart shows how many of the total detections belong to the Top 100 (1-100), Top 1000 (101-1000) and Top 10 000 (1001-10 000) most downloaded projects. This information helps you understand the impact of the issue within each community, making it clearer when the issue affects the most popular projects.

If the chart shows zero values for all of the top project groups, that means all detections were in unranked projects (lower than 10 000 on the list of most downloaded projects).