CWE-1272: Sensitive Information Uncleared Before Debug/Power State Transition

Description

The product performs a power or debug state transition, but it does not clear sensitive information that should no longer be accessible due to changes to information access restrictions.

Submission Date :

May 31, 2020, midnight

Modification Date :

2023-06-29 00:00:00+00:00

Organization :

Intel Corporation
Extended Description

A device or system frequently employs many power and sleep states during its normal operation (e.g., normal power, additional power, low power, hibernate, deep sleep, etc.). A device also may be operating within a debug condition. State transitions can happen from one power or debug state to another. If there is information available in the previous state which should not be available in the next state and is not properly removed before the transition into the next state, sensitive information may leak from the system.

Example Vulnerable Codes

Example - 1

This example shows how an attacker can take advantage of an incorrect state transition.

Suppose a device is transitioning from state A to state B. During state A, it can read certain private keys from the hidden fuses that are only accessible in state A but not in state B. The device reads the keys, performs operations using those keys, then transitions to state B, where those private keys should no longer be accessible.

<xhtml_p>During the transition from A to B, the device does not scrub the memory.</xhtml_p>

After the transition to state B, even though the private keys are no longer accessible directly from the fuses in state B, they can be accessed indirectly by reading the memory that contains the private keys.

For transition from state A to state B, remove information which should not be available once the transition is complete.

Related Weaknesses

This table shows the weaknesses and high level categories that are related to this weakness. These relationships are defined to give an overview of the different insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction.

CWE-200: Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor
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CWE-226: Sensitive Information in Resource Not Removed Before Reuse
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