CWE-1246: Improper Write Handling in Limited-write… | Glexia
CWE-1246 (Improper Write Handling in Limited-write Non-Volatile Memories) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1246: Improper Write Handling in Limited-write Non-Volatile Memories
Improper Write Handling in Limited-write Non-Volatile Memories represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability: DoS: Instability: If wear leveling is improperly implemented, attackers may be able to programmatically cause the storage to become unreliable within a much shorter time than would normally be expected.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1246 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-1246, 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-1246: Improper Write Handling in Limited-write Non-Volatile Memories
The product does not implement or incorrectly implements wear leveling operations in limited-write non-volatile memories.
Non-volatile memories such as NAND Flash, EEPROM, etc. have individually erasable segments, each of which can be put through a limited number of program/erase or write cycles. For example, the device can only endure a limited number of writes, after which the device becomes unreliable. In order to wear out the cells in a uniform manner, non-volatile memory and storage products based on the above-mentioned technologies implement a technique called wear leveling. Once a set threshold is reached, wear leveling maps writes of a logical block to a different physical block. This prevents a single physical block from prematurely failing due to a high concentration of writes.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- An attacker can render a memory line unusable by repeatedly causing a write to the memory line. Below is example code from [REF-1058] that the user can execute repeatedly to cause line failure. W is the maximum associativity of any cache in the system; S is the size of the largest cache in the system. Without wear leveling, the above attack will be successful. Simple randomization of blocks will not suffice as instead of the original physical block, the randomized physical block will be worn out.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design Implementation Testing: Include secure wear leveling algorithms and ensure they may not be bypassed.
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.