CAPEC-680: Exploitation of Improperly Controlled Registers
Description
Extended Description
Hardware systems often utilize trusted lock bits to prevent a set of registers from being written to or to restrict a register to only being written to once. Registers are also frequently used to store sensitive data leveraged in additional security operations, such as secure booting, authenticating code, device attestation, and more. However, the access control mechanisms meant to protect these registers may be fully missing or ineffective due to misconfiguration. If an adversary is able to discover improper access controls surrounding registers, it could result in the adversary obtaining sensitive data and/or modifying data that is meant to be immutable. This can ultimately result in processes like secure boot being circumvented or in protected configurations being modified.
Relationships with other CAPECs
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.
Prerequisites
The conditions that must already be true for an attacker to be able to carry out this attack pattern.
- Awareness of the hardware being leveraged.
- Access to the hardware being leveraged.
Skills required
The knowledge and capability an attacker needs in order to carry out this attack pattern.
- High Intricate knowledge of registers.
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-1224: Improper Restriction of Write-Once Bit Fields
CWE-1231: Improper Prevention of Lock Bit Modification
CWE-1233: Security-Sensitive Hardware Controls with Missing Lock Bit Protection
CWE-1262: Improper Access Control for Register Interface
CWE-1283: Mutable Attestation or Measurement Reporting Data
Visit https://capec.mitre.org/ for more details.