Nanofocused X-ray beam to reprogram secure circuits

Stephanie Anceau (1, 2) , Pierre Bleuet (1, 2) , Jessy Clediere (1, 2) , Laurent Maingault (1, 2) , Jean Luc Rainard (1, 2) , Remi Tucoulou (3)

1 DSYS - Département Systèmes
2 MINATEC 17
3 ESRF - European Synchroton Radiation Facility [Grenoble]

Synchrotron X-ray nano-beamlines is investigated as a tool to perturb microcontroller circuits. This technique is used to target the Flash, EEPROM and RAM memory of a circuit. The obtained results are very promising and show that it is possible to corrupt a single transistor in a semi-permanent state. A simple heat treatment can remove the induce effect, thus making the corruption reversible. A concrete attack on a code stored in Flash is demonstrated.

Keywords: X-ray; Flash; EEPROM; RAM; circuit edit; MOS Stuck-At

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]

Stephanie Anceau, Pierre Bleuet, Jessy Clediere, Laurent Maingault, Jean Luc Rainard, et al.. Nanofocused X-ray beam to reprogram secure circuits. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2017, Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems - CHES 2017, 10529, pp.175-188. ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-66787-4_9⟩. ⟨cea-03986080⟩