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SQ14145

Detected Windows executable files that convert read-only access to writable or executable as a side-effect of their alignment and memory layout.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
failhighhigh4hardening: fail
Reason: unsafe code linking practices

About the issue​

Windows executable files are mapped in memory as a sequence of allocated pages. The pages are grouped into sections that can expand their virtual memory footprints, and exceed the size of the physical content backing them. Virtual memory requirements for each section are rounded up by the section alignment value. When this alignment value is lesser than the memory allocation granularity, applying correct section access rights becomes challenging. When read-only sections share the memory page with writable or executable content, the access rights get expanded to satisfy all access requirements. Therefore, it is possible that a bad memory layout can cause the operating system to nullify the read-only section attributes. Using unsafe section access rights may lead to exposing critical security data to overwrites, tampering, and complete bypasses of vulnerability mitigations.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Re-compile the affected application with the latest programming language toolchain, and adjust the alignment to match the memory allocation granularity.
  • In Microsoft VisualStudio, you can adjust the alignment value by passing it through the /ALIGN option to the 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).