BaseDraft

CWE-1277Firmware Not Updateable

Category: other

Description

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. 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. 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.

Common consequences· 1

  • Confidentiality / Integrity / Access Control / Authentication / Authorization — Gain Privileges or Assume Identity, Bypass Protection Mechanism, Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands, DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
    If an attacker can identify an exploitable vulnerability in one device that has no means of patching, the attack may be used against an entire class of devices.

Potential mitigations· 3

  • [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.

Related CAPEC attack patterns· 1

CAPEC-682

References

  1. https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1277.html

Exploits (incoming)1

TypeTargetConfidenceTier
AttackPatternExploitation of Firmware or ROM Code with Unpatchable Vulnerabilitiescapec-682100%live

Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.

CWE
Missing Security-Relevant Feedback for Unexecuted Operations in Hardware Interface
CWE
Reliance on Component That is Not Updateable
CVE
CVE-2025-1058
CWE
Improper Access Control for Volatile Memory Containing Boot Code
CWE
Improper Protection against Electromagnetic Fault Injection (EM-FI)
CWE
Security-Sensitive Hardware Controls with Missing Lock Bit Protection
Sourced from MITRE CWE 4.20. Curated for EU compliance use cases by Adam Lundqvist, Founder at SQUR.