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SQ14159

Detected Windows executable files with exception handlers susceptible to pointer hijacking.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
NonepasshighmediumNonehardening: warning
Reason: execution hijacking concerns

About the issue​

Sensitive executable memory regions should be kept as read-only to protect the integrity of trusted execution code flow paths. Exception handlers are pointers to functions that implement the error-handling logic. If those pointers are changed by malicious code, execution paths can be redirected to unintended locations. Most modern programming language toolchains protect those memory regions appropriately. Newest linker versions also track programming language-specific handlers and protect them from runtime manipulation. These issues are commonly reported for outdated linkers and non-compliant executable packing solutions.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Review the programming language linker options, and consider a build toolchain update.

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).