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SQ14128

Detected Windows executable files that do not implement delayed import function hijacking mitigation protection.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
passmediummediumNonehardening: pass
Reason: low priority mitigations absent

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. Function pointers that get resolved through import and delayed import address tables do not need to be monitored during application runtime. Instead, it is expected that modern programming language toolchains place those pointers in read-only memory locations. However, the delayed import functions are resolved as they are needed during runtime. To ensure the function pointers remain read-only, the operating system must be made aware if it is safe to re-protect the memory pages that hold them. Modern toolchains typically separate import data from other application regions for this very reason.

How to resolve the issue​

  • 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. 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).