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TH16120

Detected presence of software components that can elevate the user privileges.

priorityCI/CD statusseverityeffortSAFE levelSAFE assessment
passhighhighNoneNone

About the issue​

Operating systems execute application code in multiple privilege access levels. Separation of privileges is designed to protect the stability and integrity of the operating system by shielding it from issues that the user run applications may cause. However, some users may need to interact with higher privilege parts of the operating system to accomplish specific tasks. For this purpose, operating systems provide facilities that users may leverage to temporarily elevate their running privileges. Users with higher privileges can run any application with the same privilege level as their own. Attackers often try to trick privileged users into running malicious code, enabling them to infect the operating system. While the presence of code that elevates user privileges does not necessarily imply malicious intent, all of its uses in a software package should be documented and approved. Only select applications should consider using functions that can elevate user privileges. One example of acceptable use for such functions is allowing the users to install software packages and updates.

How to resolve the issue​

  • Investigate reported detections as indicators of software tampering.
  • Consult Mitre ATT&CK documentation: T1548 - Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism.
  • Consider rewriting the flagged code without using the marked behaviors.

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).