December 19, 2025 By Bill Toulas
The UEFI firmware implementation in some motherboards from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock is vulnerable to direct memory access (DMA) attacks that can bypass early-boot memory protections.
The security issue has received multiple identifiers (CVE-2025-11901, CVE-2025‑14302, CVE-2025-14303, and CVE-2025-14304) due to differences in vendor implementations
DMA is a hardware feature that allows devices such as graphics cards, Thunderbolt devices, and PCIe devices to read and write directly to RAM without involving the CPU.
IOMMU is a hardware-enforced memory firewall that sits between devices and RAM, controlling which memory regions are accessible for each device.
During early boot, when UEFI firmware initializes, IOMMU must activate before DMA attacks are possible; otherwise, there is no protection in place to stop reading or writing on memory regions via physical access.
