Weakness · Medium
CWE-1338: Improper Protections Against Hardware Overheating
What it is
A hardware device is missing or has inadequate protection features to prevent overheating.
- 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, electrical circuits, and semiconductor silicon have thermal side effects, such that some of the energy consumed by the device gets dissipated as heat and increases the temperature of the device. For example, in semiconductors, higher-operating frequency of silicon results in higher power dissipation and heat. The leakage current in CMOS circuits increases with temperature, and this creates positive feedback that can result in thermal runaway and damage the device permanently. Any device lacking protections such as thermal sensors, adequate platform cooling, or thermal insulation is susceptible to attacks by malicious software that might deliberately operate the device in modes that result in overheating. This can be used as an effective denial of service (DoS) or permanent denial of service (PDoS) attack. Depending on the type of hardware device and its expected usage, such thermal overheating can also cause safety hazards and reliability issues. Note that battery failures can also cause device overheating but the mitigations and examples included in this submission cannot reliably protect against a battery failure. There can be similar weaknesses with lack of protection from attacks based on overvoltage or overcurrent conditions. However, thermal heat is generated by hardware operation and the device should implement protection from overheating.
What an attacker can do
- DoS: Resource Consumption (Other) (Availability)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Temperature maximum and minimum limits should be enforced using thermal sensors both in silicon and at the platform level.
Implementation
- The platform should support cooling solutions such as fans that can be modulated based on device-operation needs to maintain a stable temperature.
How to find it
- Dynamic Analysis with Manual Results Interpretation. Dynamic tests should be performed to stress-test temperature controls.
- Architecture or Design Review. Power management controls should be part of Architecture and Design reviews.
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.