Sensitive Information Uncleared Before Debug/Power State Transition
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.
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.
Demonstrations
The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.
Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.
Example One
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.
During the transition from A to B, the device does not scrub the memory.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.See Also
Weaknesses in this category are related to resource lifecycle management.
Weaknesses in this category are related to hardware debug and test interfaces such as JTAG and scan chain.
This view (slice) covers all the elements in CWE.
CWE entries in this view are listed in the 2021 CWE Most Important Hardware Weaknesses List, as determined by the Hardware CWE Special Interest Group (HW CWE SIG).
This view (slice) lists weaknesses that can be introduced during design.
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