CAPEC-521: Hardware Design Specifications Are Altered
An attacker with access to a manufacturer's hardware manufacturing process documentation alters the design specifications, which introduces flaws advantageous to the attacker once the system is deployed.
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Overview
CAPEC-521 (Hardware Design Specifications Are Altered) is a detailed-level attack pattern catalogued by MITRE in the Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC). It describes a recurring method attackers use to exploit software weaknesses.
What the attacker needs
Prerequisites
- Advanced knowledge of hardware capabilities of a manufacturer's product.
- Access to the manufacturer's documentation.
Skills required
- High skill: Ability to read, interpret, and subsequently alter manufacturer's documentation to cause errors in design specifications.
- High skill: Ability to stealthly gain access via remote compromise or physical access to the manufacturer's documentation.
How to mitigate it
Defenses that reduce the risk of CAPEC-521.
- Digitize documents and cryptographically sign them to verify authenticity.
- Password protect documents and make them read-only for unauthorized users.
- Avoid emailing important documents and configurations.
- Ensure deleted files are actually deleted.
- Maintain backups of the document for recovery and verification.
- Separate need-to-know information from system configuration information depending on the user.
Examples
To operate at full capability, a manufacturer's network intrusion detection device needs to have either a Intel Xeon E7-2820 or AMD FX-8350 which have 8 "cores" available, allowing for advanced threading needed to handle large volumes of network traffic without resorting to dropping packets from the detection process. The attacker alters the documentation to state that the system design must use the Intel Core Duo or the AMD Phenom II X2, which only have 2 cores, causing the system to drop large amounts of packets during deployment at a victim site with large amounts of network traffic.