CAPEC-680: Exploitation of Improperly Controlled Registers

Description
<p>An adversary exploits missing or incorrectly configured access control within registers to read/write data that is not meant to be obtained or modified by a user.<p>
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.

Severity :

High

Possibility :

Medium

Type :

Detailed
Prerequisites

This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern.

  • Awareness of the hardware being leveraged.
  • 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.

  • High Intricate knowledge of registers.
Taxonomy mappings

Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.

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