CVE-2019-15894
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.
Does this matter?
Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.44%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.
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.
- CVSS 3.1
- 6.8 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:P/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
- EPSS
- 0.44% probability · 38th percentile
- Public exploits
- None in Exploit-DB
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Weakness
- CWE-755
- Affected
- espressif/esp-idf
- Source
- cve@mitre.org
EPSS 0.4% since 27 October 2026; no change recorded yet. Points are recorded when the score first appears and whenever it moves by a percentage point or more.
References
- https://www.espressif.com/en/news/Espressif_Security_Advisory_Concerning_Fault_Injection_and_Secure_BootMitigation, Vendor Advisory
- https://www.espressif.com/en/news/Espressif_Security_Advisory_Concerning_Fault_Injection_and_Secure_BootMitigation, Vendor Advisory
Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.