ASRock, ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI Boards vulnerable to pre-boot memory attacks

Researchers have disclosed a newly identified UEFI vulnerability that affects select ASRock, ASUS, GIGABYTE and MSI motherboards, enabling early-boot DMA attacks that bypass IOMMU protections. Modern systems rely on UEFI and IOMMU to shield memory during boot, but the flaw causes the firmware to report DMA protection as active while failing to enable the IOMMU early in startup, allowing a malicious PCIe device with physical access to read or modify memory before the operating system loads.

Vendors have issued advisories and firmware patches to fix the IOMMU initialization and restore DMA protections, with users urged to apply updates promptly. The advisory was published by researchers Nick Peterson and Mohamed Al-Sharifi of Riot Games, and an official CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) advisory describes the impact and mitigations.

The vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2025-11901, CVE-2025-14302, CVE-2025-14303 and CVE-2025-14304, each carrying a CVSS score of 7.0, affecting ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI and ASRock families respectively. Follow-up guidance stresses patching in environments with limited physical access and monitoring vendor advisories for new patches.