Weakness · Medium
CWE-1301: Insufficient or Incomplete Data Removal within Hardware Component
What it is
The product's data removal process does not completely delete all data and potentially sensitive information within hardware components.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
Physical properties of hardware devices, such as remanence of magnetic media, residual charge of ROMs/RAMs, or screen burn-in may still retain sensitive data after a data removal process has taken place and power is removed. Recovering data after erasure or overwriting is possible due to a phenomenon called data remanence. For example, if the same value is written repeatedly to a memory location, the corresponding memory cells can become physically altered to a degree such that even after the original data is erased that data can still be recovered through physical characterization of the memory cells.
What an attacker can do
- Read Memory (Confidentiality)
- Read Application Data (Confidentiality)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Apply blinding or masking techniques to implementations of cryptographic algorithms.
Implementation
- Alter the method of erasure, add protection of media, or destroy the media to protect the data.
H2 Security
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.