· 2 min read
2021 CWE Top 25 Most Important Hardware Weaknesses
The list of the most important hardware weaknesses in the 2021 CWE Most Important Hardware Weaknesses listed in numerical order by CWE identifier

The 2021 CWE™ Most Important Hardware Weaknesses is the first of its kind and the result of collaboration within the Hardware CWE Special Interest Group (SIG), a community forum for individuals representing organizations within hardware design, manufacturing, research, and security domains, as well as academia and government. The goals for the 2021 Hardware List are to drive awareness of common hardware weaknesses through CWE, and to prevent hardware security issues at the source by educating designers and programmers on how to eliminate important mistakes early in the product development lifecycle. Security analysts and test engineers can use the list in preparing plans for security testing and evaluation. Hardware consumers could use the list to help them to ask for more secure hardware products from their suppliers.
Below is a brief listing of the weaknesses in the 2021 CWE Most Important Hardware Weaknesses listed in numerical order by CWE identifier. This is an unranked list.
- CWE-1189 Improper Isolation of Shared Resources on System-on-a-Chip (SoC)
- CWE-1191 On-Chip Debug and Test Interface With Improper Access Control
- CWE-1231 Improper Prevention of Lock Bit Modification
- CWE-1233 Security-Sensitive Hardware Controls with Missing Lock Bit Protection
- CWE-1240 Use of a Cryptographic Primitive with a Risky Implementation
- CWE-1244 Internal Asset Exposed to Unsafe Debug Access Level or State
- CWE-1256 Improper Restriction of Software Interfaces to Hardware Features
- CWE-1260 Improper Handling of Overlap Between Protected Memory Ranges
- CWE-1272 Sensitive Information Uncleared Before Debug/Power State Transition
- CWE-1274 Improper Access Control for Volatile Memory Containing Boot Code
- CWE-1277 Firmware Not Updateable
- CWE-1300 Improper Protection of Physical Side Channels
Finally, managers and CIOs can use the list as a measuring stick of progress in their efforts to secure their hardware and ascertain where to direct resources to develop security tools or automation processes that mitigate a wide class of vulnerabilities by eliminating the underling root cause.
MITRE maintains the CWE web site with the support of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), presenting detailed descriptions of the 2021 Hardware List weaknesses along with authoritative guidance for mitigating and avoiding them. The CWE site contains data on more than 900 programming, design, and architecture weaknesses that can lead to exploitable vulnerabilities.
Read the full article and discover the Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses on cwe.mitre.org
