SRAM Has No Chill: Exploiting Power Domain Separation to Steal On-Chip Secrets.
The widespread use of embedded systems and smart devices has heightened the threat of physical memory attacks, such as cold boot attacks that exploit DRAM’s temporary data retention at low temperatures. Although storing secrets in on-chip SRAM typically protects against these attacks due to its isol...
| Publicado en: | Communications of the ACM Vol. 68; no. 8; pp. 82 - 91 |
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| Autores principales: | , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Association for Computing Machinery
Aug2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=186913168&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 186913168 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00010782 ACM jtl: Communications of the ACM issn: 00010782 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Aug2025 vid: 68 iid: 8 pid: 68 pub: Association for Computing Machinery artinfo: ui: 186913168 10.1145/3725845 ppf: 82 ppct: 9 formats: tig: atl: SRAM Has No Chill: Exploiting Power Domain Separation to Steal On-Chip Secrets. aug: au: Mahmod, Jubayer Hicks, Matthew affil: Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA su: Cryptography Static random access memory chips Dynamic random access memory Embedded computer systems Systems on a chip Computer security vulnerabilities sug: subj: Cryptography Static random access memory chips Dynamic random access memory Embedded computer systems Systems on a chip Computer security vulnerabilities ab: The widespread use of embedded systems and smart devices has heightened the threat of physical memory attacks, such as cold boot attacks that exploit DRAM’s temporary data retention at low temperatures. Although storing secrets in on-chip SRAM typically protects against these attacks due to its isolation and minimal capacitance, this protection is not foolproof. This paper introduces Volt Boot, an attack that bypasses traditional defenses by exploiting uneven power states in system-on-chip architectures to retain data in volatile SRAM across reboots. Tested on modern ARM Cortex-A devices, Volt Boot reliably extracts sensitive information from caches, registers, and internal RAM with perfect accuracy and no need for low temperatures or complex processing. pubtype: Periodical doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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