CWE-1300: Improper Protection of Physical Side Channels
Description
The device does not contain sufficient protection mechanisms to prevent physical side channels from exposing sensitive information due to patterns in physically observable phenomena such as variations in power consumption, electromagnetic emissions (EME), or acoustic emissions.
An adversary could monitor and measure physical phenomena to detect patterns and make inferences, even if it is not possible to extract the information in the digital domain. Physical side channels have been well-studied for decades in the context of breaking implementations of cryptographic algorithms or other attacks against security features. These side channels may be easily observed by an adversary with physical access to the device, or using a tool that is in close proximity. If the adversary can monitor hardware operation and correlate its data processing with power, EME, and acoustic measurements, the adversary might be able to recover of secret keys and data.
- Abstraction
- BaseA weakness specific enough to point to detection and prevention methods.
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Status
- Stable
Common consequences
- Confidentiality
Read Memory; Read Application Data
Potential mitigations
- Architecture and Design
Apply blinding or masking techniques to implementations of cryptographic algorithms.
- Implementation
Add shielding or tamper-resistant protections to the device to increase the difficulty of obtaining measurements of the side-channel.