CWE-1190: DMA Device Enabled Too Early in Boot Phase | Glexia
CWE-1190 (DMA Device Enabled Too Early in Boot Phase) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1190: DMA Device Enabled Too Early in Boot Phase
DMA Device Enabled Too Early in Boot Phase represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism Modify Memory: 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.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1190 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-1190, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
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.
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.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Utilize an IOMMU to orchestrate IO access from the start of the boot process.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.