On the Influence of the Laser Illumination on the Logic Cells Current Consumption

Abstract

Physical side-channel attacks represent a great challenge for today's chip design. Although attacks on CMOS dynamic power represent a class of state-of-the-art attacks, many other effects potentially affect the security of CMOS chips analogously by affecting mostly static behaviour of the chip, including aging, ionizing radiation, or non-ionizing illumination of the CMOS. Vulnerabilities exploiting data dependency in CMOS static power were already demonstrated in practice and the analogous vulnerability exploiting light-modulated static power was demonstrated by simulation. This work confirms the CMOS vulnerability related to the light-modulated data-dependent static power experimentally and discusses future work.