Weakness · High

CWE-1243: Sensitive Non-Volatile Information Not Protected During Debug

What it is

Access to security-sensitive information stored in fuses is not limited during debug.

MITRE CWE 4.19.1

Severity (our rating)
High
Likelihood of exploit
Not rated by MITRE
Introduced during
Architecture and Design, Implementation
Exploited in the wild
No CVE in CISA's catalog

In more detail

Several security-sensitive values are programmed into fuses to be used during early-boot flows or later at runtime. Examples of these security-sensitive values include root keys, encryption keys, manufacturing-specific information, chip-manufacturer-specific information, and original-equipment-manufacturer (OEM) data. After the chip is powered on, these values are sensed from fuses and stored in temporary locations such as registers and local memories. These locations are typically access-control protected from untrusted agents capable of accessing them. Even to trusted agents, only read-access is provided.

What an attacker can do

  • Modify Memory (Confidentiality, Access Control)
  • Read Memory (Confidentiality, Access Control)
  • Bypass Protection Mechanism (Confidentiality, Access Control)

How to prevent it

Architecture and Design

  • Disable access to security-sensitive information stored in fuses directly and also reflected from temporary storage locations when in debug mode.

CWE-1243 on MITRE's CWE site

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Source: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.