ASRock Motherboards CVE-2025-14304

Requires physical access to the machine and a DMA-capable PCIe (or Thunderbolt/PCIe-tunneling) device, exploitable specifically during the pre-boot window before the OS kernel and its security features (and any OS-level IOMMU/DMA remapping) are initialized. The root cause is that IOMMU/DMA protection is not properly enabled in firmware on the affected 'certain' ASRock, ASRockRack, and ASRockInd motherboard models. Limiting factors: attack vector is physical (AV:P) - no remote or network path exists; the exploit window closes once a correctly-configured OS enables its own IOMMU protection; and only specific, unenumerated board models are vulnerable.

This is a physical-access DMA attack, and the CVSS 4.0 vector (AV:P/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N, VC:H/VI:H/VA:H, score 7.0) is the dominant signal: exploitation requires the attacker to be physically present at the machine to attach a DMA-capable PCIe device, which sharply constrains real-world scalability despite the high technical impact (full arbitrary read/write of physical memory). Supporting signals all point to low urgency: EPSS is 0.35% (26th percentile), there is no CISA KEV listing, and no public exploit was identified at time of analysis - consistent with a hardware-firmware weakness rather than a remotely-scriptable flaw. The signals are coherent rather than conflicting: a genuinely high-impact primitive (pre-boot memory access defeating OS security features) gated behind a physical-presence requirement. The one metadata conflict is the 'Information Disclosure' tag, which understates the issue - the description explicitly states arbitrary read AND write of physical memory, i.e. full integrity and availability impact, not just confidentiality. Net: a legitimate high-severity issue for threat models that include physical access, supply-chain interception, or 'evil maid' scenarios, but not a mass-exploitation priority.

An attacker with brief physical access to a vulnerable ASRock motherboard (e.g. an evil-maid or supply-chain interception scenario) inserts a DMA-capable PCIe/Thunderbolt device before the OS boots. Because IOMMU is not properly enabled at that stage, the device performs arbitrary reads and writes of physical memory, extracting secrets (disk-encryption keys, credentials) or patching memory to defeat Secure Boot and OS security features. No public exploit code was identified, but generic PCIe-DMA tooling (e.g. PCILeech-class devices) makes this class of attack well-understood.