CWE-1256 Detail

The product provides software-controllable device functionality for capabilities such as power and clock management, but it does not properly limit functionality that can lead to modification of hardware memory or register bits, or the ability to observe physical side channels.

It is frequently assumed that physical attacks such as fault injection and side-channel analysis require an attacker to have physical access to the target device. This assumption may be false if the device has improperly secured power management features, or similar features. For mobile devices, minimizing power consumption is critical, but these devices run a wide variety of applications with different performance requirements. Software-controllable mechanisms to dynamically scale device voltage and frequency and monitor power consumption are common features in today's chipsets, but they also enable attackers to mount fault injection and side-channel attacks without having physical access to the device.

Fault injection attacks involve strategic manipulation of bits in a device to achieve a desired effect such as skipping an authentication step, elevating privileges, or altering the output of a cryptographic operation. Manipulation of the device clock and voltage supply is a well-known technique to inject faults and is cheap to implement with physical device access. Poorly protected power management features allow these attacks to be performed from software. Other features, such as the ability to write repeatedly to DRAM at a rapid rate from unprivileged software, can result in bit flips in other memory locations (Rowhammer, [REF-1083]).

Side channel analysis requires gathering measurement traces of physical quantities such as power consumption. Modern processors often include power metering capabilities in the hardware itself (e.g., Intel RAPL) which if not adequately protected enable attackers to gather measurements necessary for performing side-channel attacks from software.

Modes Of Introduction

Architecture and Design : An architect may initiate introduction of this weakness via exacting requirements for software accessible power/clock management requirements
Implementation : An implementer may introduce this weakness by assuming there are no consequences to unbounded power and clock management for secure components from untrusted ones.

Applicable Platforms

Language

Class: Not Language-Specific (Undetermined)

Operating Systems

Class: Not OS-Specific (Undetermined)

Architectures

Class: Not Architecture-Specific (Undetermined)

Technologies

Class: Not Technology-Specific (Undetermined)
Name: Memory Hardware (Undetermined)
Name: Power Management Hardware (Undetermined)
Name: Clock/Counter Hardware (Undetermined)

Common Consequences

Observed Examples

Potential Mitigations

Phases : Architecture and Design // Implementation

Ensure proper access control mechanisms protect software-controllable features altering physical operating conditions such as clock frequency and voltage.

Detection Methods

Manual Analysis

Perform a security evaluation of system-level architecture and design with software-aided physical attacks in scope.

Automated Dynamic Analysis

Use custom software to change registers that control clock settings or power settings to try to bypass security locks, or repeatedly write DRAM to try to change adjacent locations. This can be effective in extracting or changing data. The drawback is that it cannot be run before manufacturing, and it may require specialized software.

Effectiveness : Moderate

Vulnerability Mapping Notes

Justification : This CWE entry is at the Base level of abstraction, which is a preferred level of abstraction for mapping to the root causes of vulnerabilities.
Comment : Carefully read both the name and description to ensure that this mapping is an appropriate fit. Do not try to 'force' a mapping to a lower-level Base/Variant simply to comply with this preferred level of abstraction.

Related Attack Patterns

References

REF-1081

Plundervolt
Kit Murdock, David Oswald, Flavio D Garcia, Jo Van Bulck, Frank Piessens, Daniel Gruss.
https://plundervolt.com/

REF-1082

CLKSCREW: Exposing the Perils of Security-Oblivious Energy Management
Adrian Tang, Simha Sethumadhavan, Salvatore Stolfo.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity17/sec17-tang.pdf

REF-1083

Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them: An Experimental Study of DRAM Disturbance Errors
Yoongu Kim, Ross Daly, Jeremie Kim, Ji Hye Lee, Donghyuk Lee, Chris Wilkerson, Konrad Lai, Onur Mutlu.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~yoonguk/papers/kim-isca14.pdf

REF-1225

Exploiting the DRAM rowhammer bug to gain kernel privileges
Project Zero.
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2015/03/exploiting-dram-rowhammer-bug-to-gain.html

REF-1217

Security Engineering
Ross Anderson.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/musicfiles/manuscripts/SEv1.pdf

Submission

Modifications