Common Weakness Enumeration

CWE-273

Improper Check for Dropped Privileges

The product attempts to drop privileges but does not check or incorrectly checks to see if the drop succeeded.

Mitigation ID: MIT-46

Phase: Architecture and Design

Strategy: Separation of Privilege

Description:

  • Compartmentalize the system to have "safe" areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.
Mitigation ID: MIT-53

Phase: Implementation

Description:

  • Check the results of all functions that return a value and verify that the value is expected.
Mitigation

Phase: Implementation

Description:

  • In Windows, make sure that the process token has the SeImpersonatePrivilege(Microsoft Server 2003). Code that relies on impersonation for security must ensure that the impersonation succeeded, i.e., that a proper privilege demotion happened.

No CAPEC attack patterns related to this CWE.

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