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SQ14144

Detected Windows executable files that utilize the outdated and unsafe shared section model for inter process communication.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
failhighhigh3hardening: fail
Reason: unsafe code linking practices

About the issue​

Windows executable files are mapped in memory as a sequence of allocated pages backed by its physical content. The pages are grouped into sections with defined access rights. For data synchronization purposes, sharing section contents across process boundaries is allowed. Any executable file instance, regardless of its privilege level, has access to the same shared section data during runtime. This makes it possible to access, overwrite, tamper with, or completely bypass security mechanisms.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Shared data sections are considered unsafe, and their use should be deprecated.
  • Update data synchronization to use mapped sections. Mapped sections are named objects (created during runtime) with strictly defined security descriptors. These additional security features enable fine-grained control, and mitigate the shared section access issues.

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).