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CVE-2018-18056

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.6 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2019-08-20 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-200

Description

An issue was discovered in the Texas Instruments (TI) TM4C, MSP432E and MSP432P microcontroller series. The eXecute-Only-Memory (XOM) implementation prevents code read-outs on protected memory by generating bus faults. However, single-stepping and using breakpoints is allowed in XOM-protected flash memory. As a consequence, it is possible to execute single instructions with arbitrary system states (e.g., registers, status flags, and SRAM content) and observe the state changes produced by the unknown instruction. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by executing protected and unknown instructions with specific system states and observing the state changes. Based on the gathered information, it is possible to reverse-engineer the executed instructions. The processor acts as a kind of "instruction oracle."

Affected products

• Ti Tm4C123 Firmware: all versions
• Ti Tm4C129 Firmware: all versions

References

• https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot19/presentation/schink
• https://www.usenix.org/system/files/woot19-paper_schink.pdf
• https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot19/presentation/schink
• https://www.usenix.org/system/files/woot19-paper_schink.pdf

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