Weakness (CWE)
CWE-271: Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors
The product does not drop privileges before passing control of a resource to an actor that does not have those privileges.
How to prevent it (3 mitigations)
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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.
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Architecture and Design, Operation
Very carefully manage the setting, management, and handling of privileges. Explicitly manage trust zones in the software.
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Architecture and Design
Consider following the principle of separation of privilege. Require multiple conditions to be met before permitting access to a system resource.
Source: MITRE CWE-271
13 results · Feed
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High —
Kahi has privilege-drop and socket/log permission issues
Kahi releases up to and including v0.1.0-alpha.8 contain three privilege/permission issues, all fixed in v0.1.0-alpha.9. They were identified in a full-codebase security review on 2026-05-26. ## Affected versions All releases <= v0.1.0-alpha.8. ## Patched ver…
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Critical 9.4
CloudNativePG: Metrics exporter allows privilege escalation to PostgreSQL superuser and OS RCE
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 de…
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High 7.4
In Sudo through 1.9.17p2 before 3e474c2, a failure of a setuid, setgid, or setgroups call, during a privilege drop befo…
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Medium 5.8
Incomplete privilege drop for com.system76.CosmicGreeter.GetUserData
A Privilege Dropping / Lowering Errors/Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) Race Condition vulnerability in cosmic-greeter can allow an attacker to regain privileges that should have been dropped and abuse them in the racy checking logic. This issue affects co…
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High 7.9
Nix's privilege dropping to build user broke for macOS
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.
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High 7.8
Local root exploit via `logfile_reopen()` in screen 5.0.0 with setuid-root bit set
Screen 5.0.0 when it runs with setuid-root privileges does not drop privileges while operating on a user supplied path. This allows unprivileged users to create files in arbitrary locations with `root` ownership, the invoking user's (real) group ownership and…
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Medium 6.8
Unprivileged Stalwart Mail Server user can read files as root
Stalwart Mail Server is an open-source mail server. Prior to version 0.8.0, when using `RUN_AS_USER`, the specified user (and therefore, web interface admins) can read arbitrary files as root. This issue affects admins who have set up to run stalwart with `RU…
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High 8.0
PostgreSQL non-owner REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW CONCURRENTLY executes arbitrary SQL
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 refres…
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Medium 6.1
Apptainer's ineffective privileges drop when requesting container network
Apptainer is an open source container platform. Version 1.2.0-rc.2 introduced an ineffective privilege drop when requesting container network setup, therefore subsequent functions are called with root privileges, the attack surface is rather limited for users…
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High 8.0
Rancher's Azure AD permission changes are not reflected on active sessions
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 …
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High 7.8CVE-2022-3569 Public exploit
Due to an issue with incorrect sudo permissions, Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) suffers from a local privilege escala…
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Unscored —
A flaw incorrect umask during file or directory modification in the Linux kernel NFS (network file system) functionalit…
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Low 3.1
Kubernetes did not effectively clear service account credentials
In Kubernetes v1.12.0-v1.12.4 and v1.13.0, the rest.AnonymousClientConfig() method returns a copy of the provided config, with credentials removed (bearer token, username/password, and client certificate/key data). In the affected versions, rest.AnonymousClie…