CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management

The product does not properly assign, modify, track, or check privileges for an actor, creating an unintended sphere of control for that actor.

• Access Control: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity

• [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] Consider following the principle of separation of privilege. Require multiple conditions to be met before permitting access to a system resource.

• Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)

• CVE-2001-1555: Terminal privileges are not reset when a user logs out. • CVE-2001-1514: Does not properly pass security context to child processes in certain cases, allows privilege escalation. • CVE-2001-0128: Does not properly compute roles. • CVE-1999-1193: untrusted user placed in unix "wheel" group • CVE-2005-2741: Product allows users to grant themselves certain rights that can be used to escalate privileges. • CVE-2005-2496: Product uses group ID of a user instead of the group, causing it to run with different privileges. This is resultant from some other unknown issue. • CVE-2004-0274: Product mistakenly assigns a particular status to an entity, leading to increased privileges. • CVE-2007-4217: FTP client program on a certain OS runs with setuid privileges and has a buffer overflow. Most clients do not need extra privileges, so an overflow is not a vulnerability for those clients. • CVE-2007-5159: OS incorrectly installs a program with setuid privileges, allowing users to gain privileges. • CVE-2008-4638: Composite: application running with high privileges (CWE-250) allows user to specify a restricted file to process, which generates a parsing error that leaks the contents of the file (CWE-209). • CVE-2007-3931: Installation script installs some programs as setuid when they shouldn't be. • CVE-2002-1981: Roles have access to dangerous procedures (Accessible entities). • CVE-2002-1671: Untrusted object/method gets access to clipboard (Accessible entities). • CVE-2000-0315: Traceroute program allows unprivileged users to modify source address of packet (Accessible entities). • CVE-2000-0506: User with capability can prevent setuid program from dropping privileges (Unsafe privileged actions).