What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2004-1038

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.2 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2005-03-01 · updated 2026-06-16

Description

A design error in the IEEE1394 specification allows attackers with physical access to a device to read and write to sensitive memory using a modified FireWire/IEEE 1394 client, thus bypassing intended restrictions that would normally require greater degrees of physical access to exploit. NOTE: this was reported in 2008 to affect Windows Vista, but some Linux-based operating systems have protection mechanisms against this attack.

Affected products

• IEEE Firewire Ieee: 1394

References

• http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/04/1258210
• http://marc.info/?l=bugtraq&m=109881362530790&w=2
• http://md.hudora.de/presentations/firewire/2005-firewire-cansecwest.pdf
• http://pacsec.jp/advisories.html
• http://storm.net.nz/projects/16
• http://storm.net.nz/static/files/ab_firewire_rux2k6-final.pdf
• http://www.sec-consult.com/fileadmin/Whitepapers/Vista_Physical_Attacks.pdf
• http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/489163/100/0/threaded
• http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/489175/100/0/threaded
• http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/489189/100/0/threaded
• http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/489212/100/0/threaded
• http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/489257/100/0/threaded

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