CWE-272: Least Privilege Violation | Glexia
CWE-272 (Least Privilege Violation) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-272: Least Privilege Violation
Least Privilege Violation represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control,Confidentiality: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Read Application Data,Read Files or Directories: An attacker may be able to access resources with the elevated privilege that could not be accessed with the attacker's original privileges. This is particularly likely in conjunction with another flaw, such as a buffer overflow.
Developer Pattern
CWE-272 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-272, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-272: Least Privilege Violation
The elevated privilege level required to perform operations such as chroot() should be dropped immediately after the operation is performed.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example demonstrates the weakness.
- 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. Constraining the process inside the application's home directory before opening any files is a valuable security measure. However, the absence of a call to setuid() with some non-zero value means the application is continuing to operate with unnecessary root privileges. Any successful exploit carried out by an attacker against the application can now result in a privilege escalation attack because any malicious operations will be performed with the privileges of the superuser. If the application drops to the privilege level of a non-root user, the potential for damage is substantially reduced.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design,Operation: Very carefully manage the setting, management, and handling of privileges. Explicitly manage trust zones in the software.
- Architecture and Design: Follow the principle of least privilege when assigning access rights to entities in a software system.
- Architecture and Design:
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis - Binary or Bytecode:
- Dynamic Analysis with Automated Results Interpretation:
- Manual Static Analysis - Source Code:
- Automated Static Analysis - Source Code:
- Automated Static Analysis:
- Architecture or Design Review:
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.