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CWE Reference

CWE-1261: Improper Handling of Single Event Upsets | Glexia

CWE-1261 (Improper Handling of Single Event Upsets) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.

Release 4.20weaknessDraft
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Glexia's Take · Automated analysis

CWE-1261: Improper Handling of Single Event Upsets

Improper Handling of Single Event Upsets represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.

Executive Impact

  • Availability,Access Control: DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart,DoS: Instability,Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Bypass Protection Mechanism

Developer Pattern

CWE-1261 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-1261, 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-1261: Improper Handling of Single Event Upsets

The hardware logic does not effectively handle when single-event upsets (SEUs) occur.

Type
weakness
Abstraction
Base
Status
Draft
Source
MITRE CWE definition

Developer And Remediation Guidance

How teams prevent and detect this weakness

Causes

  • This is an example from [REF-1089]. See the reference for full details of this issue. Parity is error detecting but not error correcting.
  • In 2016, a security researcher, who was also a patient using a pacemaker, was on an airplane when a bit flip occurred in the pacemaker, likely due to the higher prevalence of cosmic radiation at such heights. The pacemaker was designed to account for bit flips and went into a default safe mode, which still forced the patient to go to a hospital to get it reset. The bit flip also inadvertently enabled the researcher to access the crash file, perform reverse engineering, and detect a hard-coded key. [REF-1101]

Remediation

  • Architecture and Design:

Detection

  • Code review
  • SAST
  • DAST
  • Focused regression tests

Mappings

Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context

Related CWEs

Related CVEs

Related CVE mappings appear after CVE records are cross-indexed.

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ATT&CK Relevance

ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.