BaseIncomplete
CWE-273Improper Check for Dropped Privileges
Category: authz
Description
The product attempts to drop privileges but does not check or incorrectly checks to see if the drop succeeded.
If the drop fails, the product will continue to run with the raised privileges, which might provide additional access to unprivileged users.
Common consequences· 2
- Access Control — Gain Privileges or Assume IdentityIf privileges are not dropped, neither are access rights of the user. Often these rights can be prevented from being dropped.
- Access Control / Non-Repudiation — Gain Privileges or Assume Identity, Hide ActivitiesIf privileges are not dropped, in some cases the system may record actions as the user which is being impersonated rather than the impersonator.
Potential mitigations· 3
- [Architecture and Design]
- [Implementation]Check the results of all functions that return a value and verify that the value is expected.
- [Implementation]In Windows, make sure that the process token has the SeImpersonatePrivilege(Microsoft Server 2003). Code that relies on impersonation for security must ensure that the impersonation succeeded, i.e., that a proper privilege demotion happened.
References
(incoming)4
| Type | Target | Confidence | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vulnerability | CVE-2025-27396cve-2025-27396 | 0% | live |
| Vulnerability | CVE-2026-21882cve-2026-21882 | 0% | live |
| Vulnerability | CVE-2026-32107cve-2026-32107 | 0% | live |
| KEVEntry | VMware vCenter Server Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilitykev-cve-2024-38813 | 0% | live |
Related by meaning· 6
Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.