September 2024
Intermediate to advanced
408 pages
7h 29m
English
Helfmeier et al. (2013) describes backside probing attacks against the Atmega328P and AT90SC3232. These two chips use the same AVR core, but the Atmega uses shallow trench isolation (STI) to separate transistors for preventing current leakage, while the AT90 has a security mesh across its top two metal layers.
In both chips, the authors were able to dig a trench through the backside of the IC to expose the fuse bits, then set or clear a fuse by tampering it with a focused ion beam (FIB). Changing the bits related to readout protection then allowed the chip to be read externally.
Fuse locations are documented in the paper, as well as notes about how the STI feature impacts the difficulty of ...
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