The product contains a component that cannot be updated or patched in order to remove vulnerabilities or significant bugs.
If the component is discovered to contain a vulnerability or critical bug, but the issue cannot be fixed using an update or patch, then the product's owner will not be able to protect against the issue. The only option might be replacement of the product, which could be too financially or operationally expensive for the product owner. As a result, the inability to patch or update can leave the product open to attacker exploitation or critical operation failures. This weakness can be especially difficult to manage when using ROM, firmware, or similar components that traditionally have had limited or no update capabilities. In industries such as healthcare, "legacy" devices can be operated for decades. As a US task force report [REF-1197] notes, "the inability to update or replace equipment has both large and small health care delivery organizations struggle with numerous unsupported legacy systems that cannot easily be replaced (hardware, software, and operating systems) with large numbers of vulnerabilities and few modern countermeasures." While hardware can be prone to this weakness, software systems can also be affected, such as when a third-party driver or library is no longer actively maintained or supported but is still critical for the required functionality.
Threat Mapped score: 1.8
Industry: Finiancial
Threat priority: P4 - Informational (Low)
CVE: CVE-2020-9054 — KEV
Chain: network-attached storage (NAS) device has a critical OS command injection (CWE-78) vulnerability that is actively exploited to place IoT devices into a botnet, but some products are "end-of-support" and cannot be patched (CWE-1277). [REF-1097]
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| Phase | Note |
|---|---|
| Requirements | Requirements development might not consider the importance of updates over the lifetime of the product or might intentionally exclude this capability due to concerns such as expense or speed to market. |
| Architecture and Design | Lack of planning during architecture development and design, or external pressures such as speed to market, could ignore the capability to update. |
| Architecture and Design | Designers might omit capabilities for updating a component due to time pressures to release the product or assumptions about the stability of the component. |
| Implementation | The weakness can appear through oversight during implementation. |
Intro: A refrigerator has an Internet interface for the official purpose of alerting the manufacturer when that refrigerator detects a fault. Because the device is attached to the Internet, the refrigerator is a target for hackers who may wish to use the device other potentially more nefarious purposes.
The refrigerator has no means of patching and is hacked becoming a spewer of email spam.Intro: A System-on-Chip (SOC) implements a Root-of-Trust (RoT) in ROM to boot secure code. However, at times this ROM code might have security vulnerabilities and need to be patched. Since ROM is immutable, it can be impossible to patch.
Body: ROM does not have built-in application-programming interfaces (APIs) to patch if the code is vulnerable. Implement mechanisms to patch the vulnerable ROM code.
Intro: The example code is taken from the JTAG module of the buggy OpenPiton SoC of HACK@DAC'21. JTAG is protected with a password checker. Access to JTAG operations will be denied unless the correct password is provided by the user. This user-provided password is first sent to the HMAC module where it is hashed with a secret crypto key. This user password hash (pass_hash) is then compared with the hash of the correct password (exp_hash). If they match, JTAG will then be unlocked.
Body: However, the SoC's crypto key is hardcoded into the design and cannot be updated [REF-1387]. Therefore, if the key is leaked somehow, there is no way to reprovision the key without having the device replaced.
module dmi_jtag(...)(...); ... PassChkValid: begin if(hashValid) begin if(exp_hash == pass_hash) begin pass_check = 1'b1; end else begin pass_check = 1'b0; end state_d = Idle; end else begin state_d = PassChkValid; end end ... hmac hmac( ... .key_i(256'h24e6fa2254c2ff632a41b...), ... ); ... endmodule