CWE-1351: Improper Handling of Hardware Behavior in… | Glexia
CWE-1351 (Improper Handling of Hardware Behavior in Exceptionally Cold Environments) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-1351: Improper Handling of Hardware Behavior in Exceptionally Cold Environments
Improper Handling of Hardware Behavior in Exceptionally Cold Environments represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity Authentication: Varies by Context Unexpected State: Consequences of this weakness are highly contextual.
Developer Pattern
CWE-1351 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-1351, 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-1351: Improper Handling of Hardware Behavior in Exceptionally Cold Environments
A hardware device, or the firmware running on it, is missing or has incorrect protection features to maintain goals of security primitives when the device is cooled below standard operating temperatures.
The hardware designer may improperly anticipate hardware behavior when exposed to exceptionally cold conditions. As a result they may introduce a weakness by not accounting for the modified behavior of critical components when in extreme environments. An example of a change in behavior is that power loss won't clear/reset any volatile state when cooled below standard operating temperatures. This may result in a weakness when the starting state of the volatile memory is being relied upon for a security decision. For example, a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) may be supplied as a security primitive to improve confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity guarantees. However, when the PUF is paired with DRAM, SRAM, or another temperature sensitive entropy source, the system designer may introduce weakness by failing to account for the chosen entropy source's behavior at exceptionally low temperatures. In the case of DRAM and SRAM, when power is cycled at low temperatures, the device will not contain the bitwise biasing caused by inconsistencies in manufacturing and will instead contain the data from previous boot. Should the PUF primitive be used in a cryptographic construction which does not account for full adversary control of PUF seed data, weakness would arise. This weakness does not cover "Cold Boot Attacks" wherein RAM or other external storage is super cooled and read externally by an attacker.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: The system should account for security primitive behavior when cooled outside standard temperatures.
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.