CWE-1351 Detail

A hardware device, or the firmware running on it, is missing or has incorrect protection features to maintain goals of security primitives when the device is cooled below standard operating temperatures.

The hardware designer may improperly anticipate hardware behavior when exposed to exceptionally cold conditions. As a result they may introduce a weakness by not accounting for the modified behavior of critical components when in extreme environments.

An example of a change in behavior is that power loss won't clear/reset any volatile state when cooled below standard operating temperatures. This may result in a weakness when the starting state of the volatile memory is being relied upon for a security decision. For example, a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) may be supplied as a security primitive to improve confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity guarantees. However, when the PUF is paired with DRAM, SRAM, or another temperature sensitive entropy source, the system designer may introduce weakness by failing to account for the chosen entropy source's behavior at exceptionally low temperatures. In the case of DRAM and SRAM, when power is cycled at low temperatures, the device will not contain the bitwise biasing caused by inconsistencies in manufacturing and will instead contain the data from previous boot. Should the PUF primitive be used in a cryptographic construction which does not account for full adversary control of PUF seed data, weakness would arise.

This weakness does not cover "Cold Boot Attacks" wherein RAM or other external storage is super cooled and read externally by an attacker.

Modes Of Introduction

Architecture and Design
Implementation

Applicable Platforms

Language

Class: Not Language-Specific (Undetermined)

Operating Systems

Class: Not OS-Specific (Undetermined)

Architectures

Class: Embedded (Undetermined)
Class: Microcomputer (Undetermined)

Technologies

Class: System on Chip (Undetermined)

Common Consequences

Potential Mitigations

Phases : Architecture and Design
The system should account for security primitive behavior when cooled outside standard temperatures.

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-1181

Low-Temperature Data Remnanence Attacks Against Intrinsic SRAM PUFs
Nikolaos Athanasios Anagnostopoulos, Tolga Arul, Markus Rosenstihl, André Schaller, Sebastian Gabmeyer, Stefan Katzenbeisser.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8491873/

REF-1182

A Fully Digital Physical Unclonable Function Based Temperature Sensor for Secure Remote Sensing
Yuan Cao, Yunyi Guo, Benyu Liu, Wei Ge, Min Zhu, Chip-Hong Chang.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8487347/

REF-1183

Machine Learning Assisted PUF Calibration for Trustworthy Proof of Sensor Data in IoT
Urbi Chatterjee, Soumi Chatterjee, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Rajat Subhra Chakraborty.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3393628

Submission

Modifications