Reliance on Component That is Not Updateable

Opis

The product contains a component that cannot be updated or patched in order to remove vulnerabilities or significant bugs.

If the component is discovered to contain a vulnerability or critical bug, but the issue cannot be fixed using an update or patch, then the product's owner will not be able to protect against the issue. The only option might be replacement of the product, which could be too financially or operationally expensive for the product owner. As a result, the inability to patch or update can leave the product open to attacker exploitation or critical operation failures. This weakness can be especially difficult to manage when using ROM, firmware, or similar components that traditionally have had limited or no update capabilities.

In industries such as healthcare, "legacy" devices can be operated for decades. As a US task force report [REF-1197] notes, "the inability to update or replace equipment has both large and small health care delivery organizations struggle with numerous unsupported legacy systems that cannot easily be replaced (hardware, software, and operating systems) with large numbers of vulnerabilities and few modern countermeasures."

While hardware can be prone to this weakness, software systems can also be affected, such as when a third-party driver or library is no longer actively maintained or supported but is still critical for the required functionality.

Skutki

• 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.

Zapobieganie

• Requirements

  Specify requirements that each component should be updateable, including ROM, firmware, etc.

• Architecture and Design

  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.

• Architecture and Design, Implementation

  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.

  Skuteczność: Moderate

• Implementation

  Implement the necessary functionality to allow each component to be updated.

Przykłady podatności

• CVE-2022-34381 Java-based SDK for TLS has an unmaintained third-party component with a critical vulnerability
• 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]

Słabość nadrzędna

• CWE-1357 Reliance on Insufficiently Trustworthy Component
• CWE-664 Improper Control of a Resource Through its Lifetime

Słabości podrzędne

• CWE-1277 Firmware Not Updateable
• CWE-1310 Missing Ability to Patch ROM Code

Kiedy powstaje

• Requirements — Requirements development might not consider the importance of updates over the lifetime of the product or might intentionally exclude this capability due to concerns such as expense or speed to market.
• Architecture and Design — Lack of planning during architecture development and design, or external pressures such as speed to market, could ignore the capability to update.
• Architecture and Design — Designers might omit capabilities for updating a component due to time pressures to release the product or assumptions about the stability of the component.
• Implementation — The weakness can appear through oversight during implementation.

Dotyczy

Not Language-Specific, Not OS-Specific, Not Architecture-Specific, Not Technology-Specific, ICS/OT

Źródła

1. Report on Improving Cybersecurity in the Health Care Industry — Health Care Industry Cybersecurity Task Force, Executive Summary, 2017
2. Zyxel Flaw Powers New Mirai IoT Botnet Strain — Brian Krebs, 2020
3. dmi_jtag.sv line 324 — 2021
4. Fix for dmi_jtag.sv — 2021