CWE-1329: Reliance on Component That is Not Updateable | Glexia
CWE-1329 (Reliance on Component That is Not Updateable) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1329: Reliance on Component That is Not Updateable
Reliance on Component That is Not Updateable 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 Other: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity Bypass Protection Mechanism Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart Quality Degradation Reduce Maintainability: If an attacker can identify an exploitable vulnerability in one product that has no means of patching, the attack may be used against all affected versions of that product.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1329 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-1329, 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-1329: Reliance on Component That is Not Updateable
The product contains a component that cannot be updated or patched in order to remove vulnerabilities or significant bugs.
If the component is discovered to contain a vulnerability or critical bug, but the issue cannot be fixed using an update or patch, then the product's owner will not be able to protect against the issue. The only option might be replacement of the product, which could be too financially or operationally expensive for the product owner. As a result, the inability to patch or update can leave the product open to attacker exploitation or critical operation failures. This weakness can be especially difficult to manage when using ROM, firmware, or similar components that traditionally have had limited or no update capabilities. In industries such as healthcare, "legacy" devices can be operated for decades. As a US task force report [REF-1197] notes, "the inability to update or replace equipment has both large and small health care delivery organizations struggle with numerous unsupported legacy systems that cannot easily be replaced (hardware, software, and operating systems) with large numbers of vulnerabilities and few modern countermeasures." While hardware can be prone to this weakness, software systems can also be affected, such as when a third-party driver or library is no longer actively maintained or supported but is still critical for the required functionality.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- A refrigerator has an Internet interface for the official purpose of alerting the manufacturer when that refrigerator detects a fault. Because the device is attached to the Internet, the refrigerator is a target for hackers who may wish to use the device other potentially more nefarious purposes.
- A System-on-Chip (SOC) implements a Root-of-Trust (RoT) in ROM to boot secure code. However, at times this ROM code might have security vulnerabilities and need to be patched. Since ROM is immutable, it can be impossible to patch. ROM does not have built-in application-programming interfaces (APIs) to patch if the code is vulnerable. Implement mechanisms to patch the vulnerable ROM code.
- The example code is taken from the JTAG module of the buggy OpenPiton SoC of HACK@DAC'21. JTAG is protected with a password checker. Access to JTAG operations will be denied unless the correct password is provided by the user. This user-provided password is first sent to the HMAC module where it is hashed with a secret crypto key. This user password hash (pass_hash) is then compared with the hash of the correct password (exp_hash). If they match, JTAG will then be unlocked. However, the SoC's crypto key is hardcoded into the design and cannot be updated [REF-1387]. Therefore, if the key is leaked somehow, there is no way to reprovision the key without having the device replaced. To fix this issue, a local register should be used (hmac_key_reg) to store the crypto key. If designers need to update the key, they can upload the new key through an input port (hmac_key_i) to the local register by enabling the patching signal (hmac_patch_en) [REF-1388].
Remediation
- Requirements: Specify requirements that each component should be updateable, including ROM, firmware, etc.
- Architecture and Design: Design the product to allow for updating of its components. Include the external infrastructure that might be necessary to support updates, such as distribution servers.
- Architecture and Design Implementation: With hardware, support patches that can be programmed in-field or during manufacturing through hardware fuses. This feature can be used for limited patching of devices after shipping, or for the next batch of silicon devices manufactured, without changing the full device ROM.
- Implementation: Implement the necessary functionality to allow each component to be updated.
Detection
- Architecture or Design Review: Check the consumer or maintainer documentation, the architecture/design documentation, or the original requirements to ensure that the documentation includes details for how to update the firmware.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.