CWE-1296: Incorrect Chaining or Granularity of Debug… | Glexia
CWE-1296 (Incorrect Chaining or Granularity of Debug Components) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1296: Incorrect Chaining or Granularity of Debug Components
Incorrect Chaining or Granularity of Debug Components represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality,Integrity,Access Control,Authentication,Authorization,Availability,Accountability: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Bypass Protection Mechanism,Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands,Modify Memory,Modify Files or Directories: Depending on the access to debug component(s) erroneously granted, an attacker could use the debug component to gain additional understanding about the system to further an attack and/or execute other commands. This could compromise any security property, including the ones listed above.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1296 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-1296, 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-1296: Incorrect Chaining or Granularity of Debug Components
The product's debug components contain incorrect chaining or granularity of debug components.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example shows how an attacker can take advantage of incorrect chaining or missing granularity of debug components. In a System-on-Chip (SoC), the user might be able to access the SoC-level TAP with a certain level of authorization. However, this access should not also grant access to all of the internal TAPs (e.g., Core). Separately, if any of the internal TAPs is also stitched to the TAP chain when it should not be because of a logic error, then an attacker can access the internal TAPs as well and execute commands there.,As a related example, suppose there is a hierarchy of TAPs (TAP_A is connected to TAP_B and TAP_C, then TAP_B is connected to TAP_D and TAP_E, then TAP_C is connected to TAP_F and TAP_G, etc.). Architecture mandates that the user have one set of credentials for just accessing TAP_A, another set of credentials for accessing TAP_B and TAP_C, etc. However, if, during implementation, the designer mistakenly implements a daisy-chained TAP where all the TAPs are connected in a single TAP chain without the hierarchical structure, the correct granularity of debug components is not implemented and the attacker can gain unauthorized access.
Remediation
- Implementation: Ensure that debug components are properly chained and their granularity is maintained at different authentication levels.
Detection
- Architecture or Design Review: Appropriate Post-Si tests should be carried out at various authorization levels to ensure that debug components are properly chained and accessible only to users with appropriate credentials.
- Dynamic Analysis with Manual Results Interpretation: Appropriate Post-Si tests should be carried out at various authorization levels to ensure that debug components are properly chained and accessible only to users with appropriate credentials.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.