Weakness · Medium
CWE-1320: Improper Protection for Outbound Error Messages and Alert Signals
What it is
Untrusted agents can disable alerts about signal conditions exceeding limits or the response mechanism that handles such alerts.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- 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
Hardware sensors are used to detect whether a device is operating within design limits. The threshold values for these limits are set by hardware fuses or trusted software such as a BIOS. Modification of these limits may be protected by hardware mechanisms. When device sensors detect out of bound conditions, alert signals may be generated for remedial action, which may take the form of device shutdown or throttling. Warning signals that are not properly secured may be disabled or used to generate spurious alerts, causing degraded performance or denial-of-service (DoS). These alerts may be masked by untrusted software. Examples of these alerts involve thermal and power sensor alerts.
What an attacker can do
- DoS: Instability (Availability)
- DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart (Availability)
- Reduce Reliability (Availability)
- Unexpected State (Availability)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Alert signals generated by critical events should be protected from access by untrusted agents. Only hardware or trusted firmware modules should be able to alter the alert configuration.
H2 Security
Found it in your code?
We review where it appears, fix it with your team, and check it was not already used against you.
Talk to our teamT Academy
Stop writing it in the first place
Learn to build software and systems without weaknesses like this one, with practice on real hosts in your browser, every objective checked on the machine.
Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.