CWE-1298: Hardware Logic Contains Race Conditions | Glexia
CWE-1298 (Hardware Logic Contains Race Conditions) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1298: Hardware Logic Contains Race Conditions
Hardware Logic Contains Race Conditions represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Access Control: Bypass Protection Mechanism,Gain Privileges or Assume Identity,Alter Execution Logic
Developer Pattern
CWE-1298 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-1298, 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-1298: Hardware Logic Contains Race Conditions
A race condition in the hardware logic results in undermining security guarantees of the system.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The code below shows a 2x1 multiplexor using logic gates. Though the code shown below results in the minimum gate solution, it is disjoint and causes glitches. The buggy line of code, commented above, results in signal 'z' periodically changing to an unwanted state. Thus, any logic that references signal 'z' may access it at a time when it is in this unwanted state. This line should be replaced with the line shown below in the Good Code Snippet which results in signal 'z' remaining in a continuous, known, state. Reference for the above code, along with waveforms for simulation can be found in the references below.,This line of code removes the glitch in signal z.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Adopting design practices that encourage designers to recognize and eliminate race conditions, such as Karnaugh maps, could result in the decrease in occurrences of race conditions.
- Implementation: Logic redundancy can be implemented along security critical paths to prevent race conditions. To avoid metastability, it is a good practice in general to default to a secure state in which access is not given to untrusted agents.
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.