2025 CWE MIHW Key InsightsThe 2025 Most Important Hardware Weaknesses (MIHW) highlight CWEs that encompass both longstanding challenges in hardware security and emerging areas of concern. During the review process, the team identified several noteworthy elements that merit special attention. In this section, we analyze the lists, compare them to previous findings, and explore potential factors that may explain the observed trends, recognizing that these interpretations are informed by the limited evidence and community input but may not capture all the underlying dynamics. Comparison to the 2021 MIHWDespite the change in methodology and the inclusion of CVE data in deriving the new MIHW, five entries from 2021 remain on the 2025 MIHW:
These entries represent persistent challenges in hardware security that are both theoretically significant and commonly observed in practice. Their continued inclusion, even with the shift to a hybrid expert and data-driven selection process, underscores their ongoing importance. While the other seven entries from 2021 fell off the 2025 MIHW, four of them appear within our Expert Insights:
This may indicate that these are emerging weaknesses that are well understood by experts but are not yet widely reported. Alternatively, these weaknesses may be routinely identified and addressed early in the development cycle, preventing them from appearing in fielded products when public reporting typically occurs. Three 2021 entries did not make the 2025 MIHW and Expert Insights:
This may reflect evolving trends in CVE data, shifting expert perspectives, or the prioritization of more pressing hardware security concerns. Six CWEs made the MIHW for the first time:
One CWE added to the corpus after the 2021 MIHW release is included in the 2025 Expert Insights:
New entries in the 2025 MIHW and Expert Insights may reflect increased focus on issues such as resource reuse, debug mode issues, fault injection, and register interfaces. The inclusion of transient execution weaknesses may suggest greater attention and concern over microarchitectural issues. While a cryptographic-related weakness fell off the MIHW, another appeared on Expert Insights, possibly indicating evolving priorities in cryptographic security. Hardware View CategoriesThe table below presents a mapping between the 2025 Most Important Hardware Weaknesses (MIHW), Expert Insights, and the Hardware View categories. The chart shows which hardware security weaknesses (listed by CWE number and description on the right) are relevant to each HW-View category (listed along the top on the left). A check mark indicates that a particular weakness is part of the corresponding HW category, highlighting areas of overlap and coverage. |
