CWE-1301 — Insufficient or Incomplete Data Removal within Hardware Component
CWE-1301: Insufficient or Incomplete Data Removal within Hardware Component
MITRE CWE weakness
| Kind | Weakness |
| Abstraction | Base |
| Status | Incomplete |
| Likelihood of exploit | — |
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.
Common consequences
- Confidentiality: Read Memory, Read Application Data
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.
References
- CWE page: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1301.html
- CWE list: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/index.html