COMMON ATTACK PATTERN ENUMERATION AND CLASSIFICATIONLive MITRE record

CAPEC-521

Hardware Design Specifications Are Altered

An attacker with access to a manufacturer's hardware manufacturing process documentation alters the design specifications, which introduces flaws advantageous to the attacker once the system is deployed.

Abstraction

Detailed

Typical severity

High

Likelihood of attack

Low

Understand the attack

What is this attack pattern?

An attacker with access to a manufacturer's hardware manufacturing process documentation alters the design specifications, which introduces flaws advantageous to the attacker once the system is deployed.

Requirements

What does the attack require?

Prerequisites

  • Advanced knowledge of hardware capabilities of a manufacturer's product.
  • Access to the manufacturer's documentation.

Skills required

  • High: Ability to read, interpret, and subsequently alter manufacturer's documentation to cause errors in design specifications.
  • High: Ability to stealthly gain access via remote compromise or physical access to the manufacturer's documentation.

Resources required

Not stated in the MITRE record.

Defence

How is it prevented and mitigated?

1
Digitize documents and cryptographically sign them to verify authenticity.
2
Password protect documents and make them read-only for unauthorized users.
3
Avoid emailing important documents and configurations.
4
Ensure deleted files are actually deleted.
5
Maintain backups of the document for recovery and verification.
6
Separate need-to-know information from system configuration information depending on the user.

Real world

MITRE example instances

Example instance 1Detail
To operate at full capability, a manufacturer's network intrusion detection device needs to have either a Intel Xeon E7-2820 or AMD FX-8350 which have 8 "cores" available, allowing for advanced threading needed to handle large volumes of network traffic without resorting to dropping packets from the detection process. The attacker alters the documentation to state that the system design must use the Intel Core Duo or the AMD Phenom II X2, which only have 2 cores, causing the system to drop large amounts of packets during deployment at a victim site with large amounts of network traffic.
CAPEC-521: Hardware Design Specifications Are Altered — DayBreach Saldırı Sözlüğü · DayBreach