280 (Weakness Base)

Very carefully manage the setting, management and handling of permissions. Explicitly manage trust zones in the software.

Design: Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design and that the compartmentalization serves to allow for and further reinforce privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide when it is appropriate to use and to drop system privileges, but they should also plan for cases in which those privileges might fail.

Implementation: Always check to see if you have successfully accessed a resource or system functionality, and use proper error handling if it is unsuccessful. Do this even when you are operating in a highly privileged mode, because errors or environmental conditions might still cause a failure. For example, environments with highly granular permissions/privilege models, such as Windows or Linux capabilities, can cause unexpected failures.

This can be both primary and resultant. When primary, it can expose a variety of weaknesses because a resource might not have the expected state, and subsequent operations might fail. It is often resultant from Unchecked Error Condition (CWE-391).

This type of issue is under-studied, since researchers often concentrate on whether an object has too many permissions, instead of not enough. These weaknesses are likely to appear in environments with fine-grained models for permissions and privileges, which can include operating systems and other large-scale software packages. However, even highly simplistic permission/privilege models are likely to contain these issues if the developer has not considered the possibility of access failure.

PLOVER - Fails poorly due to insufficient permissions

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