CVE-2022-4020 — Vulnerability in the HQSwSmiDxe DXE driver on some consumer Acer Notebook device

Vulnerability in the HQSwSmiDxe DXE driver on some consumer Acer Notebook devices may allow an attacker with elevated privileges to modify UEFI Secure Boot settings by modifying an NVRAM variable.

01What is this vulnerability?

Vulnerability in the HQSwSmiDxe DXE driver on some consumer Acer Notebook devices may allow an attacker with elevated privileges to modify UEFI Secure Boot settings by modifying an NVRAM variable.

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
Acer	Aspire A315	22 — 1.04
Acer	Aspire A115	21 — 1.04
Acer	Aspire A315	22G — 1.04
Acer	Extensa EX215	21 — 1.04
Acer	Extensa EX215	21G — 1.04

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2022-11-28T13:00:01.057Z
• Last modified: 2025-04-14T18:16:59.908Z

09References

• community.acer.com — https://community.acer.com/en/kb/articles/15520-security-vulnerability-regarding…