Improper Handling of Single Event Upsets

Opis

The hardware logic does not effectively handle when single-event upsets (SEUs) occur.

Technology 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.

Skutki

• Availability, Access Control

  DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart; DoS: Instability; Gain Privileges or Assume Identity; Bypass Protection Mechanism

Zapobieganie

• Architecture and Design

  Implement triple-modular redundancy around security-sensitive modules.

• Architecture and Design

  SEUs mostly affect SRAMs. For SRAMs storing security-critical data, implement Error-Correcting-Codes (ECC) and Address Interleaving.

Słabość nadrzędna

• CWE-1384 Improper Handling of Physical or Environmental Conditions

Pokrewna

• CWE-1254 Incorrect Comparison Logic Granularity

Kiedy powstaje

• Architecture and Design
• Implementation

Dotyczy

Not Language-Specific, Not OS-Specific, Not Architecture-Specific, Not Technology-Specific

Źródła

1. Single Event Upset: An Embedded Tutorial — Fan Wang, Vishwani D. Agrawal
2. Single Event Upsets in Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators — P. D. Bradley, E. Normand
3. Single Event Effects in FPGA Devices 2015-2016 — Melanie Berg, Kenneth LaBel, Jonathan Pellish
4. Cisco 12000 Single Event Upset Failures Overview and Work Around Summary — Cisco
5. Different Ways to Mitigate Soft Errors in Asynchronous SRAMs - KBA90939 — Cypress
6. Cosmic particles can change elections and cause plans to fall through the sky, scientists warn — Ian Johnston
7. The Hard-coded Key to my Heart - Hacking a Pacemaker Programmer — Anders B. Wilhelmsen, Eivind S. Kristiansen, Marie Moe, 2019