CWE-1261: Improper Handling of Single Event Upsets
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Edit Custom FilterTechnology trends such as CMOS-transistor down-sizing, use of new materials, and system-on-chip architectures continue to increase the sensitivity of systems to soft errors. These errors are random, and their causes might be internal (e.g., interconnect coupling) or external (e.g., cosmic radiation). These soft errors are not permanent in nature and cause temporary bit flips known as single-event upsets (SEUs). SEUs are induced errors in circuits caused when charged particles lose energy by ionizing the medium through which they pass, leaving behind a wake of electron-hole pairs that cause temporary failures. If these failures occur in security-sensitive modules in a chip, it might compromise the security guarantees of the chip. For instance, these temporary failures could be bit flips that change the privilege of a regular user to root. This table specifies different individual consequences
associated with the weakness. The Scope identifies the application security area that is
violated, while the Impact describes the negative technical impact that arises if an
adversary succeeds in exploiting this weakness. The Likelihood provides information about
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consequences in the list. For example, there may be high likelihood that a weakness will be
exploited to achieve a certain impact, but a low likelihood that it will be exploited to
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Relevant to the view "Research Concepts" (CWE-1000)
Relevant to the view "Hardware Design" (CWE-1194)
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Languages Class: Not Language-Specific (Undetermined Prevalence) Operating Systems Class: Not OS-Specific (Undetermined Prevalence) Architectures Class: Not Architecture-Specific (Undetermined Prevalence) Technologies Class: Not Technology-Specific (Undetermined Prevalence) Example 1 This is an example from [REF-1089]. See the reference for full details of this issue. Parity is error detecting but not error correcting. (bad code)
Example Language: Other
Due to single-event upsets, bits are flipped in memories. As a result, memory-parity checks fail, which results in restart and a temporary denial of service of two to three minutes.
(good code)
Example Language: Other
Using error-correcting codes could have avoided the restart caused by SEUs.
Example 2 In 2016, a security researcher, who was also a patient using a pacemaker, was on an airplane when a bit flip occurred in the pacemaker, likely due to the higher prevalence of cosmic radiation at such heights. The pacemaker was designed to account for bit flips and went into a default safe mode, which still forced the patient to go to a hospital to get it reset. The bit flip also inadvertently enabled the researcher to access the crash file, perform reverse engineering, and detect a hard-coded key. [REF-1101]
This MemberOf Relationships table shows additional CWE Categories and Views that
reference this weakness as a member. This information is often useful in understanding where a
weakness fits within the context of external information sources.
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