CWE - CWE-1342: Information Exposure through Microarchitectural State after Transient Execution (4.18)

Home > CWE List > CWE-1342: Information Exposure through Microarchitectural State after Transient Execution (4.18)

CWE Glossary Definition

CWE-1342: Information Exposure through Microarchitectural State after Transient Execution

Weakness ID: 1342

Vulnerability Mapping: ALLOWED This CWE ID may be used to map to real-world vulnerabilities
Abstraction: Base Base - a weakness that is still mostly independent of a resource or technology, but with sufficient details to provide specific methods for detection and prevention. Base level weaknesses typically describe issues in terms of 2 or 3 of the following dimensions: behavior, property, technology, language, and resource.

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Description

The processor does not properly clear microarchitectural state after incorrect microcode assists or speculative execution, resulting in transient execution.

Extended Description

In many processor architectures an exception, mis-speculation, or microcode assist results in a flush operation to clear results that are no longer required. This action prevents these results from influencing architectural state that is intended to be visible from software. However, traces of this transient execution may remain in microarchitectural buffers, resulting in a change in microarchitectural state that can expose sensitive information to an attacker using side-channel analysis. For example, Load Value Injection (LVI) [REF-1202] can exploit direct injection of erroneous values into intermediate load and store buffers.

Several conditions may need to be fulfilled for a successful attack:

incorrect transient execution that results in remanence of sensitive information;
attacker has the ability to provoke microarchitectural exceptions;
operations and structures in victim code that can be exploited must be identified.

Common Consequences

Section HelpThis table specifies different individual consequences associated with the weakness. The Scope identifies the application security area that is violated, while the Impact describes the negative technical impact that arises if an adversary succeeds in exploiting this weakness. The Likelihood provides information about how likely the specific consequence is expected to be seen relative to the other consequences in the list. For example, there may be high likelihood that a weakness will be exploited to achieve a certain impact, but a low likelihood that it will be exploited to achieve a different impact.

Impact	Details
Modify Memory; Read Memory; Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands	Scope: Confidentiality, Integrity Likelihood: Medium

Potential Mitigations

Phase(s)	Mitigation
Architecture and Design; Requirements	Hardware ensures that no illegal data flows from faulting micro-ops exists at the microarchitectural level. Effectiveness: High Note: Being implemented in silicon it is expected to fully address the known weaknesses with limited performance impact.
Build and Compilation	Include instructions that explicitly remove traces of unneeded computations from software interactions with microarchitectural elements e.g. lfence, sfence, mfence, clflush. Effectiveness: High Note: This effectively forces the processor to complete each memory access before moving on to the next operation. This may have a large performance impact.

Relationships

Section Help This table shows the weaknesses and high level categories that are related to this weakness. These relationships are defined as ChildOf, ParentOf, MemberOf and give insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction. In addition, relationships such as PeerOf and CanAlsoBe are defined to show similar weaknesses that the user may want to explore.

Relevant to the view "Research Concepts" (View-1000)

Nature	Type	ID	Name
ChildOf	Base Base - a weakness that is still mostly independent of a resource or technology, but with sufficient details to provide specific methods for detection and prevention. Base level weaknesses typically describe issues in terms of 2 or 3 of the following dimensions: behavior, property, technology, language, and resource.	226	Sensitive Information in Resource Not Removed Before Reuse

Relevant to the view "Hardware Design" (View-1194)

Nature	Type	ID	Name
MemberOf	Category Category - a CWE entry that contains a set of other entries that share a common characteristic.	1201	Core and Compute Issues
ChildOf	Base Base - a weakness that is still mostly independent of a resource or technology, but with sufficient details to provide specific methods for detection and prevention. Base level weaknesses typically describe issues in terms of 2 or 3 of the following dimensions: behavior, property, technology, language, and resource.	226	Sensitive Information in Resource Not Removed Before Reuse

Modes Of Introduction

Section HelpThe different Modes of Introduction provide information about how and when this weakness may be introduced. The Phase identifies a point in the life cycle at which introduction may occur, while the Note provides a typical scenario related to introduction during the given phase.

Phase	Note
Architecture and Design
Requirements

Applicable Platforms

Section HelpThis listing shows possible areas for which the given weakness could appear. These may be for specific named Languages, Operating Systems, Architectures, Paradigms, Technologies, or a class of such platforms. The platform is listed along with how frequently the given weakness appears for that instance.

Languages

Class: Not Language-Specific (Undetermined Prevalence)

Operating Systems

Class: Not OS-Specific (Undetermined Prevalence)

Architectures

Class: Workstation (Undetermined Prevalence)

x86 (Undetermined Prevalence)

ARM (Undetermined Prevalence)

Other (Undetermined Prevalence)

Technologies

Class: Not Technology-Specific (Undetermined Prevalence)

Class: System on Chip (Undetermined Prevalence)

Demonstrative Examples

Example 1

Faulting loads in a victim domain may trigger incorrect transient forwarding, which leaves secret-dependent traces in the microarchitectural state. Consider this example from [REF-1203].

Consider the code gadget:

(bad code)

Example Language: C

void call_victim(size_t untrusted_arg) {

*arg_copy = untrusted_arg;
array[**trusted_ptr * 4096];

}

A processor with this weakness will store the value of untrusted_arg (which may be provided by an attacker) to the stack, which is trusted memory. Additionally, this store operation will save this value in some microarchitectural buffer, e.g. the store queue.

In this code gadget, trusted_ptr is dereferenced while the attacker forces a page fault. The faulting load causes the processor to mis-speculate by forwarding untrusted_arg as the (speculative) load result. The processor then uses untrusted_arg for the pointer dereference. After the fault has been handled and the load has been re-issued with the correct argument, secret-dependent information stored at the address of trusted_ptr remains in microarchitectural state and can be extracted by an attacker using a code gadget.

Selected Observed Examples

Note: this is a curated list of examples for users to understand the variety of ways in which this weakness can be introduced. It is not a complete list of all CVEs that are related to this CWE entry.

Reference	Description
CVE-2020-0551	Load value injection in some processors utilizing speculative execution may allow an authenticated user to enable information disclosure via a side-channel with local access.

Memberships

Section HelpThis MemberOf Relationships table shows additional CWE Categories and Views that reference this weakness as a member. This information is often useful in understanding where a weakness fits within the context of external information sources.

Nature	Type	ID	Name
MemberOf	CategoryCategory - a CWE entry that contains a set of other entries that share a common characteristic.	1416	Comprehensive Categorization: Resource Lifecycle Management

Vulnerability Mapping Notes

Usage ALLOWED

(this CWE ID may be used to map to real-world vulnerabilities)

Reason Acceptable-Use

Rationale

This CWE entry is at the Base level of abstraction, which is a preferred level of abstraction for mapping to the root causes of vulnerabilities.

Comments

Carefully read both the name and description to ensure that this mapping is an appropriate fit. Do not try to 'force' a mapping to a lower-level Base/Variant simply to comply with this preferred level of abstraction.

Notes

Relationship

CWE-1342 differs from CWE-1303, which is related to misprediction and biasing microarchitectural components, while CWE-1342 addresses illegal data flows and retention. For example, Spectre is an instance of CWE-1303 biasing branch prediction to steer the transient execution indirectly.

Maintenance

As of CWE 4.9, members of the CWE Hardware SIG are closely analyzing this entry and others to improve CWE's coverage of transient execution weaknesses, which include issues related to Spectre, Meltdown, and other attacks. Additional investigation may include other weaknesses related to microarchitectural state. As a result, this entry might change significantly in CWE 4.10.

Related Attack Patterns

CAPEC-ID	Attack Pattern Name
CAPEC-696	Load Value Injection

References

[REF-1202] Jo Van Bulck, Daniel Moghimi, Michael Schwarz, Moritz Lipp, Marina Minkin, Daniel Genkin, Yuval Yarom, Berk Sunar, Daniel Gruss, and Frank Piessens. "LVI - Hijacking Transient Execution with Load Value Injection". 2020.
<https://lviattack.eu/>.

[REF-1203] Jo Van Bulck, Daniel Moghimi, Michael Schwarz, Moritz Lipp, Marina Minkin, Daniel Genkin, Yuval Yarom, Berk Sunar, Daniel Gruss, and Frank Piessens. "LVI: Hijacking Transient Execution through Microarchitectural Load Value Injection". 2020年01月09日.
<https://lviattack.eu/lvi.pdf>.

[REF-1204] "Hijacking Transient Execution through Microarchitectural Load Value Injection". 2020年05月18日.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99kVz-YGi6Y>.

[REF-1205] Stephan van Schaik, Marina Minkin, Andrew Kwong, Daniel Genkin, Yuval Yarom. "CacheOut: Leaking Data on Intel CPUs via Cache Evictions". 2020年12月28日.
<https://cacheoutattack.com/files/CacheOut.pdf>.

Content History

Submissions
Submission Date	Submitter	Organization
2021年09月22日 (CWE 4.6, 2021年10月28日)	Anders Nordstrom, Alric Althoff	Cycuity (originally submitted as Tortuga Logic)
2021年09月22日 (CWE 4.6, 2021年10月28日)
Modifications
Modification Date	Modifier	Organization
2024年02月29日 (CWE 4.14, 2024年02月29日)	CWE Content Team	MITRE
2024年02月29日 (CWE 4.14, 2024年02月29日)	updated Description
2023年06月29日	CWE Content Team	MITRE
2023年06月29日	updated Mapping_Notes
2023年04月27日	CWE Content Team	MITRE
2023年04月27日	updated Relationships
2022年10月13日	CWE Content Team	MITRE
2022年10月13日	updated Demonstrative_Examples, Maintenance_Notes, Related_Attack_Patterns

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Page Last Updated: September 09, 2025

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