16 nRF52 APPROTECT Glitch
Access Port Protection (APPROTECT) is nRF52’s replacement for the nRF51’s family’s MPU-based protection features that we saw in Chapter 9. It fixes the vulnerabilities of the older platform, providing a debugging interface to unlocked chips but a very limited interface to locked chips. On a locked chip, the debugger can do little except erase all of memory, unlocking the chip but destroying any secrets that might once have been in flash memory. A glitching attack against APPROTECT was first described in two articles: Results (2020a) and Results (2021b). The specific target of these papers was the nRF52840, but the entire family is expected to be vulnerable.
Because these chips have no boot ROM, all peripherals are initialized ...
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