CWE-1323: Improper Management of Sensitive Trace Data | Glexia
CWE-1323 (Improper Management of Sensitive Trace Data) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1323: Improper Management of Sensitive Trace Data
Improper Management of Sensitive Trace Data represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Confidentiality: Read Memory: An adversary can read secret values if they are captured in debug traces and stored unsafely.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1323 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-1323, 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-1323: Improper Management of Sensitive Trace Data
Trace data collected from several sources on the System-on-Chip (SoC) is stored in unprotected locations or transported to untrusted agents.
To facilitate verification of complex System-on-Chip (SoC) designs, SoC integrators add specific IP blocks that trace the SoC's internal signals in real-time. This infrastructure enables observability of the SoC's internal behavior, validation of its functional design, and detection of hardware and software bugs. Such tracing IP blocks collect traces from several sources on the SoC including the CPU, crypto coprocessors, and on-chip fabrics. Traces collected from these sources are then aggregated inside trace IP block and forwarded to trace sinks, such as debug-trace ports that facilitate debugging by external hardware and software debuggers. Since these traces are collected from several security-sensitive sources, they must be protected against untrusted debuggers. If they are stored in unprotected memory, an untrusted software debugger can access these traces and extract secret information. Additionally, if security-sensitive traces are not tagged as secure, an untrusted hardware debugger might access them to extract confidential information.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In a SoC, traces generated from sources include security-sensitive IP blocks such as CPU (with tracing information such as instructions executed and memory operands), on-chip fabric (e.g., memory-transfer signals, transaction type and destination, and on-chip-firewall-error signals), power-management IP blocks (e.g., clock- and power-gating signals), and cryptographic coprocessors (e.g., cryptographic keys and intermediate values of crypto operations), among other non-security-sensitive IP blocks including timers and other functional blocks. The collected traces are then forwarded to the debug and trace interface used by the external hardware debugger.
Remediation
- Implementation: Tag traces to indicate owner and debugging privilege level (designer, OEM, or end user) needed to access that trace.
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.