Motorola MTM5000 series firmwares lack properly configured memory protection of pages shared between the OMAP-L138 ARM and DSP cores. The SoC provides two memory protection units, MPU1 and MPU2, to enforce the trust boundary between the two cores. Since both units are left unconfigured by the firmwares, an adversary with control over either core can trivially gain code execution on the other, by overwriting code located in shared RAM or DDR2 memory regions.
The product allows address regions to overlap, which can result in the bypassing of intended memory protection.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mtm5500_firmware | Motorola | - (including) | - (including) |
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.