COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-1190

DMA Device Enabled Too Early in Boot Phase

The product enables a Direct Memory Access (DMA) capable device before the security configuration settings are established, which allows an attacker to extract data from or gain privileges on the product.

Abstraction

Base

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product enables a Direct Memory Access (DMA) capable device before the security configuration settings are established, which allows an attacker to extract data from or gain privileges on the product.

Extended description

DMA is included in a number of devices because it allows data transfer between the computer and the connected device, using direct hardware access to read or write directly to main memory without any OS interaction. An attacker could exploit this to access secrets. Several virtualization-based mitigations have been introduced to thwart DMA attacks. These are usually configured/setup during boot time. However, certain IPs that are powered up before boot is complete (known as early boot IPs) may be DMA capable. Such IPs, if not trusted, could launch DMA attacks and gain access to assets that should otherwise be protected.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

Bypass Protection MechanismModify Memory

Affected security scopes: Access Control

DMA devices have direct write access to main memory and due to time of attack will be able to bypass OS or Bootloader access control.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Architecture and Design

Architecture and design approach

Detail
Utilize an IOMMU to orchestrate IO access from the start of the boot process.