Micron Crucial MX500 series SSD, firmware M3CR046

Impact

Specially crafted ATA packets sent from the HOST to the drive controller overflow a buffer in the firmware, with high confidentiality, integrity and availability impact. This is the shape of bug that matters most for bare-metal multi-tenancy: the attack surface is the ordinary storage command path, reachable from the operating system, not a JTAG pad or a soldering iron. A tenant with root on the machine can reach the controller's memory. TOP TENANT-HANDOFF RISK PATTERN: a departing tenant who achieves code execution on the drive controller can attempt to leave something behind that outlives your reimage entirely, because your reimage rewrites NAND contents and never touches controller firmware. Even short of a persistent implant, controller-level code execution means the drive's own reports about sanitize, lock state and encryption become worthless.

Who can reach it

A tenant with root (high privilege) on the bare-metal host, issuing crafted ATA commands down the normal storage path. No physical access, no chassis entry, no special hardware - this is reachable from a shell on the rented machine.

What to do

Flash past M3CR046; Micron states the issue was fully remediated in December 2024 and firmware is on Crucial's MX500 support page. Drive offline for the flash, plus Crucial's own tooling. The broader point for an operator: the MX500 is a consumer SSD and has no business being tenant-writable media in a bare-metal fleet - if you find these in GPU nodes (they turn up as cheap boot/scratch drives in budget builds), the correct remediation is to replace them with datacenter SKUs, not just to patch. Where you cannot replace, deny tenants the ability to issue raw ATA/NVMe pass-through: do not hand out unfiltered block devices, and if the tenant workload does not need direct device access, put a virtualization or filesystem layer between them and the controller. Note also that Crucial Storage Executive, the management tool you would use to flash this, has its own separate installer DLL-preloading flaw (CVE-2025-71178) - patch the tool before you trust it.

References