Analysis Description

NXP LPC55S6x microcontrollers (0A and 1B), i.MX RT500 (silicon rev B1 and B2), i.MX RT600 (silicon rev A0, B0), LPC55S6x, LPC55S2x, LPC552x (silicon rev 0A, 1B), and LPC55S1x, LPC551x (silicon rev 0A) include an undocumented ROM patch peripheral that allows unsigned, non-persistent modification of the internal ROM. The peripheral is accessible from any execution mode (secure/privileged, secure/unprivileged, non-secure/privileged, non-secure/unprivileged). The ROM includes a set of APIs intended for use by a secure application to perform flash and in-application programming (IAP) operations. An attacker may use the ROM patch peripheral to modify the implementation of these ROM APIs from a non-secure, unprivileged context. If a non-secure application can also cause the secure application to invoke these ROM APIs, this provides privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution.