CWE-1222: Insufficient Granularity of Address Regions… | Glexia
CWE-1222 (Insufficient Granularity of Address Regions Protected by Register Locks) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1222: Insufficient Granularity of Address Regions Protected by Register Locks
Insufficient Granularity of Address Regions Protected by Register Locks represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Other: System security configuration cannot be defined in a way that does not conflict with functional requirements of device.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1222 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-1222, 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-1222: Insufficient Granularity of Address Regions Protected by Register Locks
The product defines a large address region protected from modification by the same register lock control bit. This results in a conflict between the functional requirement that some addresses need to be writable by software during operation and the security requirement that the system configuration lock bit must be set during the boot process.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- For example, consider a hardware unit with a 32 kilobyte configuration address space where the first 8 kilobyte address contains security sensitive controls that must only be writable by device bootloader. One way to protect the security configuration could be to define a 32 bit system configuration locking register (SYS_LOCK) where each bit lock locks the corresponding 1 kilobyte region. If a register exists within the first kilobyte address range (e.g. SW_MODE, address 0x310) and needs to be software writable at runtime, then this register cannot be written in a securely configured system since SYS_LOCK register lock bit 0 must be set to protect other security settings (e.g. SECURITY_FEATURE_ENABLE, address 0x0004). The only fix would be to change the hardware logic or not set the security lock bit.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design:
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.