COMMON ATTACK PATTERN ENUMERATION AND CLASSIFICATIONLive MITRE record

CAPEC-679

Exploitation of Improperly Configured or Implemented Memory Protections

An adversary takes advantage of missing or incorrectly configured access control within memory to read/write data or inject malicious code into said memory.

Abstraction

Detailed

Typical severity

Very High

Likelihood of attack

Medium

Understand the attack

What is this attack pattern?

An adversary takes advantage of missing or incorrectly configured access control within memory to read/write data or inject malicious code into said memory.

Extended description

Hardware product designs often need to implement memory protection features to prevent users from reading and modifying memory reserved for security operations such as secure booting, authenticating code, device attestation, and more. However, these protection features may be missing if not configured by developers. For example, this can occur if the developers assume these features are configured elsewhere. Additionally, developers often attempt to impose proper protection features, but may incorrectly configure these controls. One such example would be setting controls with insufficient granularity for protected address regions. If an adversary is able to discover improper access controls surrounding memory, it could result in the adversary obtaining sensitive data, executing code, circumventing security mechanisms, escalating privileges, or even denying service to higher privilege software.

Requirements

What does the attack require?

Prerequisites

Access to the hardware being leveraged.

Skills required

Medium: Ability to craft malicious code to inject into the memory region.
High: Intricate knowledge of memory structures.

Resources required

Not stated in the MITRE record.

Impact

What does a successful attack lead to?

Modify Data

Affected scopes: Integrity

Read Data

Affected scopes: Confidentiality

Execute Unauthorized Commands

Affected scopes: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability

Gain Privileges

Affected scopes: Confidentiality, Access Control, Authorization

Defence

How is it prevented and mitigated?

Ensure that protected and unprotected memory ranges are isolated and do not overlap.

If memory regions must overlap, leverage memory priority schemes if memory regions can overlap.

Ensure that original and mirrored memory regions apply the same protections.

Ensure immutable code or data is programmed into ROM or write-once memory.

Real world

MITRE example instances

Example instance 1Detail

A hardware product contains non-volatile memory, which itself contains boot code that is insufficiently protected. An adversary then modifies this memory to either bypass the secure boot process or to execute their own code.

Example instance 2Detail

A hardware product leverages a CPU that does not possess a memory-protection unit (MPU) and a memory-management unit (MMU) nor a special bit to support write exclusivity, resulting in no write exclusivity. Because of this, an adversary is able to inject malicious code into the memory and later execute it to achieve the desired outcome.