Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
CWE-250
Overtime trend (NVD)
CVSS severity (NVD, All Time)
Per technology (GHSA, All time)
- 56%-Go
- 39%-Pip
- 4%-Maven
Short description
Extended description
New weaknesses can be exposed because running with extra privileges, such as root or Administrator, can disable the normal security checks being performed by the operating system or surrounding environment. Other pre-existing weaknesses can turn into security vulnerabilities if they occur while operating at raised privileges.
Privilege management functions can behave in some less-than-obvious ways, and they have different quirks on different platforms. These inconsistencies are particularly pronounced if you are transitioning from one non-root user to another. Signal handlers and spawned processes run at the privilege of the owning process, so if a process is running as root when a signal fires or a sub-process is executed, the signal handler or sub-process will operate with root privileges.
Best practices to prevent this CWE
Phase: Architecture and Design; Operation
Strategy: Environment Hardening
Run your code using the lowest privileges that are required to accomplish the necessary tasks. If possible, create isolated accounts with limited privileges that are only used for a single task. That way, a successful attack will not immediately give the attacker access to the rest of the software or its environment. For example, database applications rarely need to run as the database administrator, especially in day-to-day operations.
Phase: Architecture and Design
Strategy: Separation of Privilege
Identify the functionality that requires additional privileges, such as access to privileged operating system resources. Wrap and centralize this functionality if possible, and isolate the privileged code as much as possible from other code. Raise privileges as late as possible, and drop them as soon as possible to avoid CWE-271. Avoid weaknesses such as CWE-288 and CWE-420 by protecting all possible communication channels that could interact with the privileged code, such as a secondary socket that is only intended to be accessed by administrators.
Phase: Architecture and Design
Strategy: Attack Surface Reduction
Identify the functionality that requires additional privileges, such as access to privileged operating system resources. Wrap and centralize this functionality if possible, and isolate the privileged code as much as possible from other code. Raise privileges as late as possible, and drop them as soon as possible to avoid CWE-271. Avoid weaknesses such as CWE-288 and CWE-420 by protecting all possible communication channels that could interact with the privileged code, such as a secondary socket that is only intended to be accessed by administrators.
Phase: Implementation
Perform extensive input validation for any privileged code that must be exposed to the user and reject anything that does not fit your strict requirements.
Phase: Implementation
When dropping privileges, ensure that they have been dropped successfully to avoid CWE-273. As protection mechanisms in the environment get stronger, privilege-dropping calls may fail even if it seems like they would always succeed.
Phase: Implementation
If circumstances force you to run with extra privileges, then determine the minimum access level necessary. First identify the different permissions that the software and its users will need to perform their actions, such as file read and write permissions, network socket permissions, and so forth. Then explicitly allow those actions while denying all else. Perform extensive input validation and canonicalization to minimize the chances of introducing a separate vulnerability. This mitigation is much more prone to error than dropping the privileges in the first place.
Phase: Operation; System Configuration
Strategy: Environment Hardening
Ensure that the software runs properly under the United States Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB) or an equivalent hardening configuration guide, which many organizations use to limit the attack surface and potential risk of deployed software.
