The product allows address regions to overlap, which can result in the bypassing of intended memory protection.

Isolated memory regions and access control (read/write) policies are used by hardware to protect privileged software. Software components are often allowed to change or remap memory region definitions in order to enable flexible and dynamically changeable memory management by system software.

If a software component running at lower privilege can program a memory address region to overlap with other memory regions used by software running at higher privilege, privilege escalation may be available to attackers. The memory protection unit (MPU) logic can incorrectly handle such an address overlap and allow the lower-privilege software to read or write into the protected memory region, resulting in privilege escalation attack. An address overlap weakness can also be used to launch a denial of service attack on the higher-privilege software memory regions.

This 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: Not Architecture-Specific (Undetermined Prevalence)
Technologies	Memory Hardware (Undetermined Prevalence) Processor Hardware (Undetermined Prevalence)

Example 1

For example, consider a design with a 16-bit address that has two software privilege levels: Privileged_SW and Non_privileged_SW. To isolate the system memory regions accessible by these two privilege levels, the design supports three memory regions: Region_0, Region_1, and Region_2.

Each region is defined by two 32 bit registers: its range and its access policy.

• Address_range[15:0]: specifies the Base address of the region
• Address_range[31:16]: specifies the size of the region
• Access_policy[31:0]: specifies what types of software can access a region and which actions are allowed

Certain bits of the access policy are defined symbolically as follows:

• Access_policy.read_np: if set to one, allows reads from Non_privileged_SW
• Access_policy.write_np: if set to one, allows writes from Non_privileged_SW
• Access_policy.execute_np: if set to one, allows code execution by Non_privileged_SW
• Access_policy.read_p: if set to one, allows reads from Privileged_SW
• Access_policy.write_p: if set to one, allows writes from Privileged_SW
• Access_policy.execute_p: if set to one, allows code execution by Privileged_SW

For any requests from software, an address-protection filter checks the address range and access policies for each of the three regions, and only allows software access if all three filters allow access.

Consider the following goals for access control as intended by the designer:

• Region_0 & Region_1: registers are programmable by Privileged_SW
• Region_2: registers are programmable by Non_privileged_SW

The intention is that Non_privileged_SW cannot modify memory region and policies defined by Privileged_SW in Region_0 and Region_1. Thus, it cannot read or write the memory regions that Privileged_SW is using.

This design could be improved in several ways.

Example 2

The example code below is taken from the IOMMU controller module of the HACK@DAC'19 buggy CVA6 SoC [REF-1338]. The static memory map is composed of a set of Memory-Mapped Input/Output (MMIO) regions covering different IP agents within the SoC. Each region is defined by two 64-bit variables representing the base address and size of the memory region (XXXBase and XXXLength).

In this example, we have 12 IP agents, and only 4 of them are called out for illustration purposes in the code snippets. Access to the AES IP MMIO region is considered privileged as it provides access to AES secret key, internal states, or decrypted data.

The vulnerable code allows the overlap between the protected MMIO region of the AES peripheral and the unprotected UART MMIO region. As a result, unprivileged users can access the protected region of the AES IP. In the given vulnerable example UART MMIO region starts at address 64'h1000_0000 and ends at address 64'h1011_1000 (UARTBase is 64'h1000_0000, and the size of the region is provided by the UARTLength of 64'h0011_1000).

On the other hand, the AES MMIO region starts at address 64'h1010_0000 and ends at address 64'h1010_1000, which implies an overlap between the two peripherals' memory regions. Thus, any user with access to the UART can read or write the AES MMIO region, e.g., the AES secret key.

To mitigate this issue, remove the overlapping address regions by decreasing the size of the UART memory region or adjusting memory bases for all the remaining peripherals. [REF-1339]

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