Description
The product contains a component that cannot be updated or patched in order to remove vulnerabilities or significant bugs.
Modes of Introduction:
– Requirements
Related Weaknesses
Consequences
Confidentiality, Integrity, Access Control, Authentication, Authorization, Other: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity, Bypass Protection Mechanism, Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands, DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, Quality Degradation, Reduce Maintainability
If an attacker can identify an exploitable vulnerability in one product that has no means of patching, the attack may be used against all affected versions of that product.
Potential Mitigations
Phase: Requirements
Description:
Specify requirements that each component should be updateable, including ROM, firmware, etc.
Phase: Architecture and Design
Description:
Design the product to allow for updating of its components. Include the external infrastructure that might be necessary to support updates, such as distribution servers.
Phase: Architecture and Design, Implementation
Effectiveness: Moderate
Description:
With hardware, support patches that can be programmed in-field or during manufacturing through hardware fuses. This feature can be used for limited patching of devices after shipping, or for the next batch of silicon devices manufactured, without changing the full device ROM.
Some parts of the hardware initialization or signature verification done to authenticate patches will always be “not patchable.” Hardware-fuse-based patches will also have limitations in terms of size and the number of patches that can be supported.
Phase: Implementation
Description:
Implement the necessary functionality to allow each component to be updated.
CVE References
- CVE-2020-9054
- Chain: network-attached storage (NAS) device has a critical OS command injection (CWE-78) vulnerability that is actively exploited to place IoT devices into a botnet, but some products are “end-of-support” and cannot be patched (CWE-1277). [REF-1097]