CWE-1264: Hardware Logic with Insecure De-Synchronization… | Glexia
CWE-1264 (Hardware Logic with Insecure De-Synchronization between Control and Data Channels) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations,…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1264: Hardware Logic with Insecure De-Synchronization between Control and Data Channels
Hardware Logic with Insecure De-Synchronization between Control and Data Channels represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality: Read Memory Read Application Data
Developer Pattern
CWE-1264 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-1264, 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-1264: Hardware Logic with Insecure De-Synchronization between Control and Data Channels
The hardware logic for error handling and security checks can incorrectly forward data before the security check is complete.
Many high-performance on-chip bus protocols and processor data-paths employ separate channels for control and data to increase parallelism and maximize throughput. Bugs in the hardware logic that handle errors and security checks can make it possible for data to be forwarded before the completion of the security checks. If the data can propagate to a location in the hardware observable to an attacker, loss of data confidentiality can occur. 'Meltdown' is a concrete example of how de-synchronization between data and permissions checking logic can violate confidentiality requirements. Data loaded from a page marked as privileged was returned to the CPU regardless of current privilege level for performance reasons. The assumption was that the CPU could later remove all traces of this data during the handling of the illegal memory access exception, but this assumption was proven false as traces of the secret data were not removed from the microarchitectural state.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- There are several standard on-chip bus protocols used in modern SoCs to allow communication between components. There are a wide variety of commercially available hardware IP implementing the interconnect logic for these protocols. A bus connects components which initiate/request communications such as processors and DMA controllers (bus masters) with peripherals which respond to requests. In a typical system, the privilege level or security designation of the bus master along with the intended functionality of each peripheral determine the security policy specifying which specific bus masters can access specific peripherals. This security policy (commonly referred to as a bus firewall) can be enforced using separate IP/logic from the actual interconnect responsible for the data routing.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Thoroughly verify the data routing logic to ensure that any error handling or security checks effectively block illegal dataflows.
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.