CWE-1223: Race Condition for Write-Once Attributes | Glexia
CWE-1223 (Race Condition for Write-Once Attributes) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1223: Race Condition for Write-Once Attributes
Race Condition for Write-Once Attributes 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: System configuration cannot be programmed in a secure way.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1223 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-1223, 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-1223: Race Condition for Write-Once Attributes
A write-once register in hardware design is programmable by an untrusted software component earlier than the trusted software component, resulting in a race condition issue.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Consider the example design module system Verilog code shown below. register_write_once_example module is an example of register that has a write-once field defined. Bit 0 field captures the write_once_status value. The first system component that sends a write cycle to this register can program the value. This could result in a race condition security issue in the SoC design, if an untrusted agent is running in the system in parallel with the trusted component that is expected to program the register.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: During hardware design, all register write-once or sticky fields must be evaluated for proper configuration.
Detection
- Automated Analysis: The testing phase should use automated tools to test that values are not reprogrammable and that write-once fields lock on writing zeros.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.