SRAM has no chill: exploiting power domain separation to steal on-chip secrets
Jubayer Mahmod, Matthew Hicks · 2022
The abundance of embedded systems and smart devices increases the risk of physical memory disclosure attacks. One such classic non-invasive attack exploits dynamic RAM's temperature-dependent ability to retain information across power cycles---known as a cold boot attack. When exposed to low temperatures, DRAM cells preserve their state for a short time without power, mimicking non-volatile memories in that time frame. Attackers exploit this physical phenomenon to gain access to a system's secrets, leading to data theft from encrypted storage. To prevent cold boot attacks, programmers hide secrets on-chip in Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM); by construction, on-chip SRAM is isolated from external probing and has little intrinsic capacitance, making it robust against cold boot attacks.