CWE-1301 Detail

The product's data removal process does not completely delete all data and potentially sensitive information within hardware components.

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.

Modes Of Introduction

Implementation

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)

Common Consequences

Observed Examples

Potential Mitigations

Phases : Architecture and Design
Apply blinding or masking techniques to implementations of cryptographic algorithms.
Phases : Implementation
Alter the method of erasure, add protection of media, or destroy the media to protect the data.

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

NotesNotes

This entry is still under development and will continue to see updates and content improvements.

References

REF-1117

Introduction to differential power analysis and related attacks
Paul Kocher, Joshua Jaffe, Benjamin Jun.
https://www.rambus.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DPATechInfo.pdf

REF-1118

The EM Side-Channel(s)
Dakshi Agrawal, Bruce Archambeault, Josyula R. Rao, Pankaj Rohatgi.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/3-540-36400-5_4.pdf

REF-1119

RSA key extraction via low-bandwidth acoustic cryptanalysis
Daniel Genkin, Adi Shamir, Eran Tromer.
https://www.iacr.org/archive/crypto2014/86160149/86160149.pdf

REF-1120

Power Analysis for Cheapskates
Colin O'Flynn.
https://media.blackhat.com/eu-13/briefings/OFlynn/bh-eu-13-for-cheapstakes-oflynn-wp.pdf

REF-1055

Data Remanence in Semiconductor Devices
Peter Gutmann.
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec01/full_papers/gutmann/gutmann.pdf

Submission

Modifications