CVE-2018-18056
Description
An issue was discovered in the Texas Instruments (TI) TM4C, MSP432E and MSP432P microcontroller series. The eXecute-Only-Memory (XOM) implementation prevents code read-outs on protected memory by generating bus faults. However, single-stepping and using breakpoints is allowed in XOM-protected flash memory. As a consequence, it is possible to execute single instructions with arbitrary system states (e.g., registers, status flags, and SRAM content) and observe the state changes produced by the unknown instruction. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by executing protected and unknown instructions with specific system states and observing the state changes. Based on the gathered information, it is possible to reverse-engineer the executed instructions. The processor acts as a kind of "instruction oracle."
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Affected products
2- Texas Instruments (TI)/microcontroller seriesdescription
Patches
Vulnerability mechanics
No source-code context for this CVE — mechanics is only generated when we can read the actual fix diff. Without that, the four sections (root cause, attack vector, affected code, fix) would be speculation rather than analysis.
References
2- www.usenix.org/conference/woot19/presentation/schinkmitrex_refsource_MISC
- www.usenix.org/system/files/woot19-paper_schink.pdfmitrex_refsource_MISC
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