CWE-1301: Insufficient or Incomplete Data Removal within Hardware Component
Description
The product's data removal process does not completely delete all data and potentially sensitive information within hardware components.
Physical properties of hardware devices, such as remanence of magnetic media, residual charge of ROMs/RAMs, or screen burn-in may still retain sensitive data after a data removal process has taken place and power is removed. Recovering data after erasure or overwriting is possible due to a phenomenon called data remanence. For example, if the same value is written repeatedly to a memory location, the corresponding memory cells can become physically altered to a degree such that even after the original data is erased that data can still be recovered through physical characterization of the memory cells.
- 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; Read Application Data
Potential mitigations
- Architecture and Design
Apply blinding or masking techniques to implementations of cryptographic algorithms.
- Implementation
Alter the method of erasure, add protection of media, or destroy the media to protect the data.