CWEweakness

CWE-278 Insecure Preserved Inherited Permissions

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Abstraction
Variant
Structure
Simple
Status
Incomplete
Languages
Not Language-Specific
CWE version
5.0

Description

A product inherits a set of insecure permissions for an object, e.g. when copying from an archive file, without user awareness or involvement.

Common consequences

• Confidentiality, Integrity: Read Application Data, Modify Application Data

Potential mitigations

• [Architecture and Design, Operation] Very carefully manage the setting, management, and handling of privileges. Explicitly manage trust zones in the software. • [Architecture and Design] 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.

Observed examples

• CVE-2005-1724: Does not obey specified permissions when exporting.

Related

Observed example · CVE (1)

  • CVE-2005-1724 NFS on Apple Mac OS X 10.4.x up to 10.4.1 does not properly obey the -network or -mask flags for a filesystem and exports it to everyone,… vulnerability

Child of · CWE (1)

  • CWE-732 Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource weakness

Referenced by CVE · weakness (7)

  • CVE-2026-71477 mise manages dev tools like node, python, cmake, and terraform. vulnerability
  • CVE-2026-6265 Insecure preserved inherited permissions vulnerability in Cerberus FTP Server on Windows allows Privilege Escalation.This issue has been… vulnerability
  • CVE-2025-2947 IBM i 7.6 contains a privilege escalation vulnerability due to incorrect profile swapping in an OS command. vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-36538 Insecure permissions in chaos-mesh v2.6.3 allows attackers to access sensitive data and escalate privileges by obtaining the service… vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-37769 Insecure permissions in 14Finger v1.1 allow attackers to escalate privileges from normal user to Administrator via a crafted POST request. vulnerability
  • CVE-2024-38531 Nix is a package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. vulnerability
  • CVE-2023-38497 Cargo downloads the Rust project’s dependencies and compiles the project. vulnerability