COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONIncomplete

CWE-1329

Reliance on Component That is Not Updateable

The product contains a component that cannot be updated or patched in order to remove vulnerabilities or significant bugs.

Soyutlama

Base

Yapı

Simple

Sömürü İhtimali

Medium

Problemi anla

Problem nedir?

The product contains a component that cannot be updated or patched in order to remove vulnerabilities or significant bugs.

Genişletilmiş açıklama

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can be prone to this weakness, software systems can also be affected, such as when a third-party driver or library is no longer actively maintained or supported but is still critical for the required functionality.

Kök neden

Problem nasıl ve ne zaman oluşur?

Yaşam döngüsü evresi

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.

Yaşam döngüsü evresi

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.

Yaşam döngüsü evresi

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.

Yaşam döngüsü evresi

Implementation

The weakness can appear through oversight during implementation.

Risk

Başarılı sömürü neye yol açar?

Gain Privileges or Assume IdentityBypass Protection MechanismExecute Unauthorized Code or CommandsDoS: Crash, Exit, or RestartQuality DegradationReduce Maintainability

Etkilenen güvenlik alanları: Confidentiality, Integrity, Access Control, Authentication, Authorization, Other

If an attacker can identify an exploitable vulnerability in one product that has no means of patching, the attack may be used against all affected versions of that product.

Savunma

Nasıl önlenir ve çözülür?

Requirements

Güvenlik gereksinimi

Detay
Specify requirements that each component should be updateable, including ROM, firmware, etc.

Architecture and Design

Mimari ve tasarım yaklaşımı

Detay
Design the product to allow for updating of its components. Include the external infrastructure that might be necessary to support updates, such as distribution servers.

Architecture and Design · Implementation

Birden fazla yaşam döngüsü evresinde uygulanacak savunma

Detay
With hardware, support patches that can be programmed in-field or during manufacturing through hardware fuses. This feature can be used for limited patching of devices after shipping, or for the next batch of silicon devices manufactured, without changing the full device ROM.

Etkinlik: Moderate

Some parts of the hardware initialization or signature verification done to authenticate patches will always be "not patchable." Hardware-fuse-based patches will also have limitations in terms of size and the number of patches that can be supported.

Implementation

Uygulama aşaması savunması

Detay
Implement the necessary functionality to allow each component to be updated.

Doğrulama

Nasıl tespit edilir?

Architecture or Design Review

Moderate
Check the consumer or maintainer documentation, the architecture/design documentation, or the original requirements to ensure that the documentation includes details for how to update the firmware.