Exploring the Interaction Between Device Lifetime Reliability and Security Vulnerabilities

As technology scales, device reliability is becoming a fundamental problem. Even though manufacture test can guarantee product quality, due to various types of wearout and failure modes, permanent faults appear in the filed is becoming an increasingly important and real problem. Such types of wear-out creates permanent faults in devices during their lifetime, but after release to the user. In this paper, we perform a formal investigation of the impact of permanent faults on security, examine empirical evidence, and demonstrate a real attack. Our results show that permanent stuck-at faults may leave security holes in microprocessors. We show that an adversary with knowledge of a fault can launch attacks which can obtain critical secrets such as a private key in 30 seconds.