CWE-1338: Improper Protections Against Hardware Overheating | Glexia
CWE-1338 (Improper Protections Against Hardware Overheating) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1338: Improper Protections Against Hardware Overheating
Improper Protections Against Hardware Overheating represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Availability: DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)
Developer Pattern
CWE-1338 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-1338, 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-1338: Improper Protections Against Hardware Overheating
A hardware device is missing or has inadequate protection features to prevent overheating.
Hardware, electrical circuits, and semiconductor silicon have thermal side effects, such that some of the energy consumed by the device gets dissipated as heat and increases the temperature of the device. For example, in semiconductors, higher-operating frequency of silicon results in higher power dissipation and heat. The leakage current in CMOS circuits increases with temperature, and this creates positive feedback that can result in thermal runaway and damage the device permanently. Any device lacking protections such as thermal sensors, adequate platform cooling, or thermal insulation is susceptible to attacks by malicious software that might deliberately operate the device in modes that result in overheating. This can be used as an effective denial of service (DoS) or permanent denial of service (PDoS) attack. Depending on the type of hardware device and its expected usage, such thermal overheating can also cause safety hazards and reliability issues. Note that battery failures can also cause device overheating but the mitigations and examples included in this submission cannot reliably protect against a battery failure. There can be similar weaknesses with lack of protection from attacks based on overvoltage or overcurrent conditions. However, thermal heat is generated by hardware operation and the device should implement protection from overheating.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Malicious software running on a core can execute instructions that consume maximum power or increase core frequency. Such a power-virus program could execute on the platform for an extended time to overheat the device, resulting in permanent damage. Execution core and platform do not support thermal sensors, performance throttling, or platform-cooling countermeasures to ensure that any software executing on the system cannot cause overheating past the maximum allowable temperature. The platform and SoC should have failsafe thermal limits that are enforced by thermal sensors that trigger critical temperature alerts when high temperature is detected. Upon detection of high temperatures, the platform should trigger cooling or shutdown automatically.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Temperature maximum and minimum limits should be enforced using thermal sensors both in silicon and at the platform level.
- Implementation: The platform should support cooling solutions such as fans that can be modulated based on device-operation needs to maintain a stable temperature.
Detection
- Dynamic Analysis with Manual Results Interpretation: Dynamic tests should be performed to stress-test temperature controls.
- Architecture or Design Review: Power management controls should be part of Architecture and Design reviews.
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.