Silicon Under Attack Physical Exploitation Of Modern Chips

Joe Grand, Lionel Riviere, Domenic Forte and Dan Grosu walk through live fault injection attacks on a modern automotive chip across three cost tiers and ask why the defenses that exist are not yet shipping in production devices.

Physical attacks on silicon are no longer a research curiosity. The tools for voltage, electromagnetic and laser fault injection are an order of magnitude cheaper than five years ago, and open frameworks, hobbyist budgets and YouTube walkthroughs have lowered the barrier significantly. Polymorphic circuits and self-destructive registers exist as defenses, yet most deployed devices still fail to raise an alarm when attacked.

In this insightful discussion, the panel of experts discuss:

• How voltage, electromagnetic and laser fault injection work in practice across hobby, professional and nation-state budget tiers on a real automotive microcontroller;
• How shrinking lithography, chiplet packaging and rising clock frequencies change the practical difficulty of laser fault injection campaigns;
• Why hardware defenses exist but are not shipping in production, and what artificial intelligence-assisted attack automation means for the next generation of hardware security.