CVE-2019-15894

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.8 v3.1)
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: 2019-10-07 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-755

Description

An issue was discovered in Espressif ESP-IDF 2.x, 3.0.x through 3.0.9, 3.1.x through 3.1.6, 3.2.x through 3.2.3, and 3.3.x through 3.3.1. An attacker who uses fault injection to physically disrupt the ESP32 CPU can bypass the Secure Boot digest verification at startup, and boot unverified code from flash. The fault injection attack does not disable the Flash Encryption feature, so if the ESP32 is configured with the recommended combination of Secure Boot and Flash Encryption, then the impact is minimized. If the ESP32 is configured without Flash Encryption then successful fault injection allows arbitrary code execution. To protect devices with Flash Encryption and Secure Boot enabled against this attack, a firmware change must be made to permanently enable Flash Encryption in the field if it is not already permanently enabled.

Affected products

espressif esp-idf: from 3.0 before 3.0.9; from 3.1 (excl.) before 3.1.6; from 3.2 (excl.) before 3.2.3; from 3.3 before 3.3.1 — fixed in 3.0.9, 3.1.6, 3.2.3, 3.3.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: espressif esp-idf 3.0.9, 3.1.6, 3.2.3, 3.3.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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