SQ14143
Detected Windows executable files that have a BSS region with executable attributes.
| priority | CI/CD status | severity | effort | SAFE level | SAFE assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | pass | high | medium | None | hardening: warning Reason: outdated toolchains detected |
About the issue
Windows executable files are mapped in memory as a sequence of allocated pages. The pages are grouped into sections with defined access rights. Block Starting Symbol (BSS) is a section of memory whose contents are reserved for variables that get their initial values assigned during runtime. Access rights for this section should not include the ability to execute stored data as code, with the accounted exception of incremental linking that merges code and data segments for improved build times. Using unsafe section access rights may lead to exposing critical security data to overwrites, tampering, and complete bypasses of vulnerability mitigations. This issue is typically reported when a software publisher uses a low quality executable packing solution.
How to resolve the issue
- You should deprecate the use of runtime packers, or enforce digital rights management via less intrusive ways that preserve compatibility with vulnerability mitigation options.
- If you use incremental builds during development, the release image should be built in a single linker pass.
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).
Recommended reading
- .bss (External resource - Wikipedia)