CWE-1320: Improper Protection for Outbound Error Messages and Alert Signals
Description
Untrusted agents can disable alerts about signal conditions exceeding limits or the response mechanism that handles such alerts.
Submission Date :
May 29, 2020, midnight
Modification Date :
2023-06-29 00:00:00+00:00
Organization :
Intel Corporation
Extended Description
Hardware sensors are used to detect whether a device is operating within design limits. The threshold values for these limits are set by hardware fuses or trusted software such as a BIOS. Modification of these limits may be protected by hardware mechanisms.
When device sensors detect out of bound conditions, alert signals may be generated for remedial action, which may take the form of device shutdown or throttling.
Warning signals that are not properly secured may be disabled or used to generate spurious alerts, causing degraded performance or denial-of-service (DoS). These alerts may be masked by untrusted software. Examples of these alerts involve thermal and power sensor alerts.
Example - 1
The processor-GPIO controller exposes software-programmable controls that allow untrusted software to reprogram the state of the GPIO pin.Reprogramming the state of the GPIO pin allows malicious software to trigger spurious alerts or to set the alert pin to a zero value so that thermal sensor alerts are not received by the processor.
The GPIO alert-signal pin is blocked from untrusted software access and is controlled only by trusted software, such as the System BIOS.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.
Visit http://cwe.mitre.org/ for more details.