CAPEC-679: Exploitation of Improperly Configured or Implemented Memory Protections
Description
Extended Description
Hardware product designs often need to implement memory protection features to prevent users from reading and modifying memory reserved for security operations such as secure booting, authenticating code, device attestation, and more. However, these protection features may be missing if not configured by developers. For example, this can occur if the developers assume these features are configured elsewhere. Additionally, developers often attempt to impose proper protection features, but may incorrectly configure these controls. One such example would be setting controls with insufficient granularity for protected address regions. If an adversary is able to discover improper access controls surrounding memory, it could result in the adversary obtaining sensitive data, executing code, circumventing security mechanisms, escalating privileges, or even denying service to higher privilege software.
Severity :
Very High
Possibility :
Medium
Type :
Detailed
Relationships with other CAPECs
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.
Prerequisites
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.
- Access to the hardware being leveraged.
Skills required
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.
- Medium Ability to craft malicious code to inject into the memory region.
- High Intricate knowledge of memory structures.
Taxonomy mappings
Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.
Related CWE
A Related Weakness relationship associates a weakness with this attack pattern. Each association implies a weakness that must exist for a given attack to be successful.
CWE-1222: Insufficient Granularity of Address Regions Protected by Register Locks
CWE-1252: CPU Hardware Not Configured to Support Exclusivity of Write and Execute Operations
CWE-1257: Improper Access Control Applied to Mirrored or Aliased Memory Regions
CWE-1260: Improper Handling of Overlap Between Protected Memory Ranges
CWE-1274: Improper Access Control for Volatile Memory Containing Boot Code
CWE-1282: Assumed-Immutable Data is Stored in Writable Memory
CWE-1312: Missing Protection for Mirrored Regions in On-Chip Fabric Firewall
CWE-1316: Fabric-Address Map Allows Programming of Unwarranted Overlaps of Protected and Unprotected Ranges
CWE-1326: Missing Immutable Root of Trust in Hardware
Visit http://capec.mitre.org/ for more details.