SQ14121
Detected Windows executable files that might not cover all statically linked libraries with safe exception handling vulnerability mitigation.
| priority | CI/CD status | severity | effort | SAFE level | SAFE assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | pass | medium | medium | None | hardening: warning Reason: ineffective mitigations detected |
About the issue
Safe Exception Handling (/SAFESEH) protects the code flow integrity by ensuring that exceptions are handled only by vetted functions. This mitigation is detected as enabled, but its effectiveness is impacted by the use of outdated precompiled code. It was determined that the application had been linked against static libraries produced by multiple toolchain versions. Because some of them predate the general availability of the safe exception handlers, it is likely that protection coverage gaps exist.
How to resolve the issue
- Recompile statically linked libraries with the same programming language toolchain version.
- 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
Recommended reading
- What is Exception Handling? (External resource - SoftCo)
- /SAFESEH (Image has Safe Exception Handlers) (External resource - Microsoft)
- A journey across static and dynamic libraries (External resource - internalpointers)