MITRE CWE-1384 Improper Handling of Physical or Environmental Conditions Vulnerability Analysis

Vulnerability Overview CWE-1384: Improper Handling of Unanticipated Environmental Conditions This vulnerability describes a product's failure to properly handle unexpected physical or environmental conditions that may occur naturally or be induced by an actor. Hardware products typically guarantee correct behavior only within specific physical limits or environmental conditions. However, the inability to handle these conditions can compromise the product's security. For example, unexpected physical or environmental conditions can lead to bit flips in data used for authentication decisions. Impact Scope Impact: Context-dependent, unexpected state Details: Scope includes confidentiality, integrity, availability Consequences: The consequences of these weaknesses heavily depend on the role of the affected component within the larger product Mitigation Strategies Potential Mitigations 1. Requirements Phase - Explicitly define product behavior when exceeding physical and environmental boundary conditions in requirements, such as entering a shutdown state. 2. Architecture and Design; Implementation Phase - Include independent components that can detect excessive environmental conditions and have shutdown capabilities, wherever possible. 3. Architecture and Design; Implementation Phase - Use shielding or other materials to increase the attacker's effort and reduce the likelihood of successfully triggering security-related faults, wherever possible. Demonstration Examples Example 1 The following C code snippet is part of a secure boot process. The signature of the runtime firmware image is calculated and compared against a golden value. If the signature matches, the bootloader loads the runtime firmware. If it does not match, an error abort occurs. If the underlying hardware executing this code lacks circuits or sensors to detect voltage or clock glitches, an attacker could inject fault injections at the marked location during the signature check, thereby bypassing the signature verification process. After bypassing secure boot, the attacker gains access to system assets that they should not have access to. Example 2 In 2016, a researcher (who was also a pacemaker patient) experienced bit flips in their pacemaker while on an airplane, likely due to the higher incidence of cosmic radiation at high altitudes. The pacemaker was designed to handle bit flips and enter a default safe mode, but it still forced the patient to go to the hospital for a reset. The bit flips unexpectedly also allowed the researcher to access crash dumps, perform reverse engineering, and detect hard-coded keys. Reference Links [REF-1248] Securing Energy Infrastructure Executive Task Force (SEI ETF). "Categories of Security Vulnerabilities in ICS". ICS Communications / 2. Unreliability. 2022-03-09. [REF-1255] Sergei Skorobogatov. "Semi-invasive attacks - A new approach to hardware security analysis". 2005-04. [REF-1285] Texas Instruments. "Physical Security Attacks Against Silicon Devices". 2022-01-31. [REF-1286] Lennert Wouters, Benedikt Gierlichs and Bart Preneel. "On The Susceptibility of Texas Instruments SimpleLink Platform Microcontrollers to Non-Invasive Physical Attacks". 1.2. 2022-03-14. [REF-1101] Anders B. Wilhelmsen, Elvind S. Kristiansen and Marie Moe. "The Hard-coded Key to my Heart - Hacking a Pacemaker Programmer". 2019-08-10. Content History Submission Date: 2022-04-21 Submitter: CWE Content Team Organization: MITRE Contribution Date: 2022-05-13 Contributor: Hardware CWE Special Interest Group Mapped Relationships ICS Communications - Unreliability ICS Dependencies (& Architecture): External Physical Systems Comprehensive Categorization: Improper Check or Handling of Exceptional Conditions Vulnerability Mapping Notes Usage: Permitted (with careful review of mapping notes) Reason: Abstraction Rationale: This CWE entry is a class and may have more appropriate base class children Comment: Check children of this entry for better matches

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MITRE CWE-1384 Improper Handling of Physical or Environmental Conditions Vulnerability Analysis