On the Influence of the Laser Illumination on the Logic Cells Current Consumption

TL;DR

This paper experimentally confirms that laser illumination can modulate static power in CMOS chips, revealing a new side-channel vulnerability that could impact chip security against physical attacks.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental validation of light-induced static power variations in CMOS, expanding understanding of physical side-channel vulnerabilities.

Findings

Laser illumination affects CMOS static power consumption.

Light-modulated static power can be exploited as a side-channel.

Experimental confirmation of light-induced vulnerabilities.

Abstract

Physical side-channel attacks represent a great challenge for today's chip design. Although attacks on CMOS dynamic power represent a class of state-of-the-art attacks, many other effects potentially affect the security of CMOS chips analogously by affecting mostly static behaviour of the chip, including aging, ionizing radiation, or non-ionizing illumination of the CMOS. Vulnerabilities exploiting data dependency in CMOS static power were already demonstrated in practice and the analogous vulnerability exploiting light-modulated static power was demonstrated by simulation. This work confirms the CMOS vulnerability related to the light-modulated data-dependent static power experimentally and discusses future work.