Fast and Low-Cost Soft Error Testing of a COTS Microcontroller with Alpha Particle Source

Leite, Felipe G. H.; Aguiar, Vitor A. P.; Added, N.; Giacomini, Renato; Medina, N. H.; Santos, R.B.B.; Silveira, M. A. G.

doi:10.1109/nsrec.2017.8115436

Cited by 4 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Over time, hardware manufacturers have been improving the selection of their materials and these kinds of soft errors have disappeared. Nonetheless, in a paper from 2017 [18], the authors show that by removing the epoxy layer of a chip, makes very easy to generate soft errors with α particles. Such particles are quite common in nature even at ground level, and hence removing the epoxy leaves the chip exposed even to innocuous radiations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Figure 1 shows the decay of Cobalt which produces different source of energy, β and γ radiations, which carry different kinetic energies, between 0.31 MeV and 1.33 MeV. Radioactive decay produces ionizing radiations which affect electronic circuits as shown in many papers [17], [18], [20], [26] and in circuit manufacturing recommendations guides [31].…”

Section: Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…b) Bit-flips from radioactive sources. : These events are intentionally generated with the help of radioactive materials, at a very small distance from the DUT in a controlled laboratory and very often in vacuum, either with strong radiation sources [17], [20], [26] or with innocuous β radiations by removing the epoxy layer of a chip [18]. Some of these experiments demonstrate the ability of generating failures in ML models and opening space for non conventional adversarial attacks.…”

Section: Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our hypothesis is to prove that high power emissions (available at radiotherapy clinics at an affordable cost [17], [18]) can be used to exploit COTS (Common Off The Shelf) electronic devices and consequently allow their exploitation [15], [23], [32], [32] or lead to wrong output of quantum computations. This is the first attempt in scientific literature to break into a device i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Deja-Vu: A Glimpse on Radioactive Soft-Error Consequences on Classical and Quantum Computations

Nappa,

Hobbs,

Lanzi

2021

Preprint

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What do Apple, the FBI and a Belgian politician have in common? In 2003, in Belgium there was an election using electronic voting machines. Mysteriously one candidate summed an excess of 4096 votes. An accurate analysis led to the official explanation that a spontaneous creation of a bit in position 13 of the memory of the computer attributed 4096 extra votes to one candidate. One of the most credited answers to this event is attributed to cosmic rays i.e.(gamma), which can filter through the atmosphere. Indeed, SEUs (single event upsets) such as bit-flips are frequent faults especially in outer space, where ionizing radiations are very frequent. For this reason many space capable devices mount very expensive and technically advanced memories, to reduce risks of malfunction, breakage, or exploit. On the other hand, at ground level, consumer devices aren't equipped with such memories for economic and statistical reasons. Indeed, research in the area shows that cosmic, highenergy rays filter inside the atmosphere on a daily basis. But when they hit our computers mostly they reach non-allocated space and systems do not notice their effects. There are cases though, with classical computers, like forensic investigations, or system recovery where such soft-errors may be helpful to gain root privileges and recover data. In this paper we show preliminary results of using radioactive sources as a mean to generate bit-flips and exploit classical electronic computation devices. We used low radioactive emissions generated by Cobalt and Cesium and obtained bit-flips which made the program under attack crash. We also provide the first overview of the consequences of SEUs in quantum computers which are today used in production for protein folding optimization, showing potential impactful consequences. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to leverage SEUs for exploitation purposes which could be of great impact on classical and quantum computers.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Deja-Vu: A Glimpse on Radioactive Soft-Error Consequences on Classical and Quantum Computations

Nappa,

Hobbs,

Lanzi

2021

Preprint

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show abstract

“…The use of [1] commercial off the shelf (COTS) is a new direction for the development of small satellite [2] technology and applications. Cost‐effective, high‐performance, and mass‐produced COTS devices meet the design needs of modern small satellites.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%