CWE-1257: Improper Access Control Applied to Mirrored or Aliased Memory Regions
Description
Aliased or mirrored memory regions in hardware designs may have inconsistent read/write permissions enforced by the hardware. A possible result is that an untrusted agent is blocked from accessing a memory region but is not blocked from accessing the corresponding aliased memory region.
- Abstraction
- BaseA weakness specific enough to point to detection and prevention methods.
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Status
- Incomplete
Common consequences
- Confidentiality
Read Memory
- Integrity
Modify Memory
- Availability
DoS: Instability
Potential mitigations
- Architecture and DesignImplementation
The checks should be applied for consistency access rights between primary memory regions and any mirrored or aliased memory regions. If different memory protection units (MPU) are protecting the aliased regions, their protected range definitions and policies should be synchronized.
- Architecture and DesignImplementation
The controls that allow enabling memory aliases or changing the size of mapped memory regions should only be programmable by trusted software components.