Weakness · Medium
CWE-278: Insecure Preserved Inherited Permissions
What it is
A product inherits a set of insecure permissions for an object, e.g. when copying from an archive file, without user awareness or involvement.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Architecture and Design, Operation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
What an attacker can do
- Read Application Data (Confidentiality, Integrity)
- Modify Application Data (Confidentiality, Integrity)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Very carefully manage the setting, management, and handling of privileges. Explicitly manage trust zones in the software.
- 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.
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.