Injecting Software Vulnerabilities with Voltage Glitching

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how voltage glitching can induce timing violations in CMOS devices, enabling attackers to compromise security-hardened consumer devices by gaining code execution and extracting secure boot ROMs.

Contribution

It introduces a practical voltage glitching attack method to bypass security measures in real-world devices, showing its effectiveness against hardened systems.

Findings

Voltage glitching causes timing violations in CMOS.

Attack successfully extracts secure boot ROM.

Demonstrates vulnerability in security-hardened devices.

Abstract

We show how voltage glitching can cause timing violations in CMOS behavior. Then we attack a real, security hardened, consumer device to gain code execution and dump the secure boot ROM.