Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors
This vulnerability occurs when a system or process fails to reduce its elevated permissions before transferring control of a resource to a less-privileged user or component.
In secure software design, a common practice is for a high-privilege process to perform a sensitive operation and then immediately lower its permissions before interacting with lower-privileged entities. This flaw breaks that chain of trust. When a system hands off a file, process, or network connection without first dropping these elevated rights, it effectively grants those high-level permissions to the receiving party, which may not be authorized to have them. This creates a dangerous privilege escalation path. By failing to contain permissions within their intended scope, the flaw allows excessive access to spread throughout the application environment. An attacker who gains control of the lower-privileged component can then inherit and abuse these unintended permissions, potentially taking full control of the system or accessing restricted data.
Impact: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity
If privileges are not dropped, neither are access rights of the user. Often these rights can be prevented from being dropped.
Impact: Gain Privileges or Assume IdentityHide Activities
If privileges are not dropped, in some cases the system may record actions as the user which is being impersonated rather than the impersonator.
Strategy: Separation of Privilege
Strategy: Separation of Privilege
ID : DX-98
The following code calls chroot() to restrict the application to a subset of the filesystem below APP_HOME in order to prevent an attacker from using the program to gain unauthorized access to files located elsewhere. The code then opens a file specified by the user and processes the contents of the file.Code Example:
cHigh
- PLOVER