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SQ14134

Detected Windows executable files that implement now deprecated RFG vulnerability mitigation protection.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
NonepasslowmediumNoneNone

About the issue​

Return Flow Guard (RFG) protects the code flow integrity by ensuring that functions return only to their respective callers. This was an experimental vulnerability mitigation protection that was deprecated due to efficacy concerns. Since the mitigation was a in-software implementation of a more advanced hardware-level protection (designed by Intel), the feature was completely removed from tooling support. Applications that still contain instrumentation for return flow protection continue to work correctly, without significant performance impact, on all operating system versions.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Re-compile the application with a newer version of the programming language toolchain. This will remove the deprecated functionality from the resulting executable, and allow for its replacement with a more secure Intel CET vulnerability mitigation protection.

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).