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SQ14124

Detected Windows executable files that might not cover all statically linked libraries with CFG vulnerability mitigation protection.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
passmediummediumNonehardening: warning
Reason: reduced effectiveness mitigations

About the issue​

Control Flow Guard (CFG/CFI) protects the code flow integrity by ensuring that indirect calls are made only to 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 This mitigation is detected as enabled, but its effectiveness is impacted by the use of outdated precompiled code.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 control flow guard vulnerability mitigation, 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 CFG mitigation by passing the /guard:cf parameter to the compiler and 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).