Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors
CWE-271
The product does not drop privileges before passing control of a resource to an actor that does not have those privileges.
We track 6 vulnerabilities of this type. 100% are rated high or critical, and the average CVSS score is 8.4.
How this weakness is prevented
- 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.
- Architecture and Design Operation: Very carefully manage the setting, management, and handling of privileges. Explicitly manage trust zones in the software.
- Architecture and Design: Consider following the principle of separation of privilege. Require multiple conditions to be met before permitting access to a system resource.
Latest Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors vulnerabilities
- 9.9 Critical severity
cloudnative-pg: Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
CloudNativePG is a platform designed to manage PostgreSQL databases within Kubernetes environments. Prior to 1.29.1 and 1.28.3, the CloudNativePG metrics exporter opens its PostgreSQL connection as the postgres superuser via the pod-local Unix socket, then dem
- 7.8 High severity
Sudo: Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors
In Sudo through 1.9.17p2 before 3e474c2, a failure of a setuid, setgid, or setgroups call, during a privilege drop before running the mailer, is not a fatal error and can lead to privilege escalation.
- 7.9 High severity
nix: Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors
Nix is a package manager for Linux and other Unix systems. Builds with Nix 2.30.0 on macOS were executed with elevated privileges (root), instead of the build users. The fix was applied to Nix 2.30.1. No known workarounds are available.
- 8.0 High severity
PostgreSQL: Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors
Late privilege drop in REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW CONCURRENTLY in PostgreSQL allows an object creator to execute arbitrary SQL functions as the command issuer. The command intends to run SQL functions as the owner of the materialized view, enabling safe refresh
- 8.8 High severity
Rancher: Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors
A Improper Privilege Management vulnerability in SUSE Rancher causes permission changes in Azure AD not to be reflected to users while they are logged in the Rancher UI. This would cause the users to retain their previous permissions in Rancher, even if they c
- 7.8 High severity
Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS): Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors
Due to an issue with incorrect sudo permissions, Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) suffers from a local privilege escalation issue in versions 9.0.0 and prior, where the 'zimbra' user can effectively coerce postfix into running arbitrary commands as 'root'.