| Attack vector | Physical | AV | The attack requires the attacker to physically touch or manipulate the vulnerable system. Physical interaction may be brief (e.g., evil maid attack1) or persistent. An example of such an attack is a cold boot attack in which an attacker gains access to disk encryption keys after physically accessing the target system. Other examples include peripheral attacks via FireWire/USB Direct Memory Access (DMA). |
| Attack Complexity | Low | AC | The attacker must take no measurable action to exploit the vulnerability. The attack requires no target-specific circumvention to exploit the vulnerability. An attacker can expect repeatable success against the vulnerable system. |
| Privileges Required | None | PR | The attacker is unauthenticated prior to attack, and therefore does not require any access to settings or files of the vulnerable system to carry out an attack. |
| User Interaction | None | UI | The vulnerable system can be exploited without interaction from any human user, other than the attacker. Examples include: a remote attacker is able to send packets to a target system a locally authenticated attacker executes code to elevate privileges |
| Scope | Unchanged | S | An exploited vulnerability can only affect resources managed by the same security authority. In the case of a vulnerability in a virtualized environment, an exploited vulnerability in one guest instance would not affect neighboring guest instances. |
| Confidentiality | High | C | There is total information disclosure, resulting in all data on the system being revealed to the attacker, or there is a possibility of the attacker gaining control over confidential data. |
| Integrity | High | I | There is a total compromise of system integrity. There is a complete loss of system protection, resulting in the attacker being able to modify any file on the target system. |
| Availability | High | A | There is a total shutdown of the affected resource. The attacker can deny access to the system or data, potentially causing significant loss to the organization. |