CWE-1301

Insufficient or Incomplete Data Removal within Hardware Component
AI Translation Available

The product's data removal process does not completely delete all data and potentially sensitive information within hardware components.

Status
incomplete
Abstraction
base

Physical properties of hardware devices, such as remanence of magnetic media, residual charge of ROMs/RAMs, or screen burn-in may still retain sensitive data after a data removal process has taken place and power is removed.

Recovering data after erasure or overwriting is possible due to a phenomenon called data remanence. For example, if the same value is written repeatedly to a memory location, the corresponding memory cells can become physically altered to a degree such that even after the original data is erased that data can still be recovered through physical characterization of the memory cells.

Common Consequences

confidentiality
Impacts
read memory read application data

Potential Mitigations

Phases:
architecture and design implementation
Descriptions:
• Alter the method of erasure, add protection of media, or destroy the media to protect the data.
• Apply blinding or masking techniques to implementations of cryptographic algorithms.