COMMON ATTACK PATTERN ENUMERATION AND CLASSIFICATIONLive MITRE record

CAPEC-516

Hardware Component Substitution During Baselining

An adversary with access to system components during allocated baseline development can substitute a maliciously altered hardware component for a baseline component during the product development and research phases. This can lead to adjustments and calibrations being made in the product so that when the final product, now containing the modified component, is deployed it will not perform as designed and be advantageous to the adversary.

Abstraction

Detailed

Typical severity

High

Likelihood of attack

Low

Understand the attack

What is this attack pattern?

An adversary with access to system components during allocated baseline development can substitute a maliciously altered hardware component for a baseline component during the product development and research phases. This can lead to adjustments and calibrations being made in the product so that when the final product, now containing the modified component, is deployed it will not perform as designed and be advantageous to the adversary.

Requirements

What does the attack require?

Prerequisites

  • The adversary will need either physical access or be able to supply malicious hardware components to the product development facility.

Skills required

  • Medium: Intelligence data on victim's purchasing habits.
  • High: Resources to maliciously construct/alter hardware components used for testing by the supplier.
  • High: Resources to physically infiltrate supplier.

Resources required

Not stated in the MITRE record.

Defence

How is it prevented and mitigated?

1
Hardware attacks are often difficult to detect, as inserted components can be difficult to identify or remain dormant for an extended period of time.
2
Acquire hardware and hardware components from trusted vendors. Additionally, determine where vendors purchase components or if any components are created/acquired via subcontractors to determine where supply chain risks may exist.

Real world

MITRE example instances

Example instance 1Detail
An adversary supplies the product development facility of a network security device with a hardware component that is used to simulate large volumes of network traffic. The device claims in logs, stats, and via the display panel to be pumping out very large quantities of network traffic, when it is in fact putting out very low volumes. The developed product is adjusted and configured to handle what it believes to be a heavy network load, but when deployed at the victim site the large volumes of network traffic are dropped instead of being processed by the network security device. This allows the adversary an advantage when attacking the victim in that the adversary's presence may not be detected by the device.
CAPEC-516: Hardware Component Substitution During Baselining — DayBreach Saldırı Sözlüğü · DayBreach