CWE-1258: Exposure of Sensitive System Information Due to… | Glexia
CWE-1258 (Exposure of Sensitive System Information Due to Uncleared Debug Information) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1258: Exposure of Sensitive System Information Due to Uncleared Debug Information
Exposure of Sensitive System Information Due to Uncleared Debug Information represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality: Read Memory
- Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism
Developer Pattern
CWE-1258 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-1258, 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-1258: Exposure of Sensitive System Information Due to Uncleared Debug Information
The hardware does not fully clear security-sensitive values, such as keys and intermediate values in cryptographic operations, when debug mode is entered.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- A cryptographic core in a System-On-a-Chip (SoC) is used for cryptographic acceleration and implements several cryptographic operations (e.g., computation of AES encryption and decryption, SHA-256, HMAC, etc.). The keys for these operations or the intermediate values are stored in registers internal to the cryptographic core. These internal registers are in the Memory Mapped Input Output (MMIO) space and are blocked from access by software and other untrusted agents on the SoC. These registers are accessible through the debug and test interface.
- To address the issue, it is essential to ensure that the register is cleared and zeroized after activating debug mode on the SoC. In the correct implementation illustrated in the good code below, core_keyx registers are set to zero when debug mode is activated [REF-1436].
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.