CWE-1277 Firmware Not Updateable

The product does not provide its users with the ability to update or patch its firmware to address any vulnerabilities or weaknesses that may be present.

• Confidentiality, Integrity, Access Control, Authentication, Authorization: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity, Bypass Protection Mechanism, Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands, DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart — Without the ability to patch or update firmware, consumers will be left vulnerable to exploitation of any known vulnerabilities, or any vulnerabilities that are discovered in the future. This can expose consumers to permanent risk throughout the entire lifetime of the device, which could be years or decades. It may be possible for the attack to be used against an entire class of devices. Some external protective measures and mitigations might be employed to aid in preventing or reducing the risk of malicious attack, but the root weakness cannot be corrected.

• [Requirements] Specify requirements to include the ability to update the firmware. Include integrity checks and authentication to ensure that untrusted firmware cannot be installed. • [Architecture and Design] Design the device to allow for updating the firmware. Ensure that the design specifies how to distribute the updates and ensure their integrity and authentication. • [Implementation] Implement the necessary functionality to allow the firmware to be updated.

• Manual Analysis: Create a new installable boot image of the current build with a minor version number change. Use the standard installation method to update the boot image. Verify that the minor version number has changed. Create a fake image. Verify that the boot updater will not install the fake image and generates an "invalid image" error message or equivalent. • Architecture or Design Review: Check the consumer or maintainer documentation, the architecture/design documentation, or the original requirements to ensure that the documentation includes details for how to update the firmware. • Manual Dynamic Analysis: Determine if there is a lack of a capability to update read-only memory (ROM) structure. This could manifest as a difference between the latest firmware version and the current version within the device.

• 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] • [REF-1095]: A hardware "smart lock" has weak key generation that allows attackers to steal the key by BLE sniffing, but the device's firmware cannot be upgraded and hence remains vulnerable [REF-1095].