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SQ14151

Detected Windows executable files that load dynamic libraries from network or remote server location.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
failhighmedium3hardening: fail
Reason: unsafe dependency references

About the issue​

Windows applications reference shared functions from the operating system (and other libraries) by importing their publicly available symbols. This modularization greatly reduces the time required to develop software, as common operations can be referenced without having to rewrite them every time they are needed. Applications can load additional libraries during their initialization sequence or their execution. In both cases, the Portable Executable (PE) file format provides the mechanisms to acquire required libraries and their public symbols. Since those libraries contain code, they must be loaded from a trusted source. If the libraries are hosted on a remote server, their code could be changed or intercepted by a malicious binary planting attack.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Ensure that your application loads all required libraries from the same machine where the application itself resides.

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).