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SQ14127

Detected Windows executable files that do not implement long jump control flow vulnerability mitigation protection.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortRL levelRL assessment
passlowmediumNoneNone

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 protects dynamically resolved function targets by instrumenting the code responsible for transferring execution control. Higher-level programming languages implement structured exception handling by managing their own code flow execution paths. As such, they are subject to code flow hijacking during runtime. Language-specific exception handling mitigation enforces execution integrity by instrumenting calls to manage execution context switching. Any deviation from the known and trusted code flow paths will cause the application to terminate. This makes malicious code less likely to execute.

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 toolchain documentation.
  • 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.

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