CWE-1300 Improper Protection of Physical Side Channels

The device does not contain sufficient protection mechanisms to prevent physical side channels from exposing sensitive information due to patterns in physically observable phenomena such as variations in power consumption, electromagnetic emissions (EME), or acoustic emissions.

Physical side channels have been well-studied for decades in the context of breaking implementations of cryptographic algorithms or other attacks against security features. These side channels may be easily observed by an adversary with physical access to the device, or using a tool that is in close proximity. If the adversary can monitor hardware operation and correlate its data processing with power, EME, and acoustic measurements, the adversary might be able to recover of secret keys and data.

• Confidentiality: Read Memory, Read Application Data — An adversary could monitor and measure physical phenomena to detect patterns and make inferences, even if it is not possible to extract the information in the digital domain.

• [Architecture and Design] Apply blinding or masking techniques to implementations of cryptographic algorithms. • [Implementation] Add shielding or tamper-resistant protections to the device to increase the difficulty of obtaining measurements of the side-channel.

• Manual Analysis: Perform a set of leakage detection tests such as the procedure outlined in the Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA) test requirements for AES [REF-1230]. TVLA is the basis for the ISO standard 17825 [REF-1229]. A separate methodology is provided by [REF-1228]. Note that sole reliance on this method might not yield expected results [REF-1239] [REF-1240]. • Manual Analysis: Post-silicon, perform full side-channel attacks (penetration testing) covering as many known leakage models as possible against test code. • Manual Analysis: Pre-silicon - while the aforementioned TVLA methods can be performed post-silicon, models of device power consumption or other physical emanations can be built from information present at various stages of the hardware design process before fabrication. TVLA or known side-channel attacks can be applied to these simulated traces and countermeasures applied before tape-out. Academic research in this field includes [REF-1231] [REF-1232] [REF-1233].

• CVE-2022-35888: Power side-channels leak secret information from processor • CVE-2021-3011: electromagnetic-wave side-channel in security-related microcontrollers allows extraction of private key • CVE-2019-14353: Crypto hardware wallet's power consumption relates to total number of pixels illuminated, creating a side channel in the USB connection that allows attackers to determine secrets displayed such as PIN numbers and passwords • CVE-2020-27211: Chain: microcontroller system-on-chip uses a register value stored in flash to set product protection state on the memory bus, but it does not contain protection against fault injection (CWE-1319), which leads to an incorrect initialization of the memory bus (CWE-1419), leading the product to be in an unprotected state. • CVE-2013-4576: message encryption software uses certain instruction sequences that allow RSA key extraction using a chosen-ciphertext attack and acoustic cryptanalysis • CVE-2020-28368: virtualization product allows recovery of AES keys from the guest OS using a side channel attack against a power/energy monitoring interface. • CVE-2019-18673: power consumption varies based on number of pixels being illuminated in a display, allowing reading of secrets such as the PIN by using the USB interface to measure power consumption