Laboratory X-rays Operando Single Bit Attacks on Flash Memory Cells

The need to increase the level of digital security standards requires a sustained research effort on new means of perturbations likely to disturb the processing of integrated circuits. X-rays modification is a powerful semi-permanent fault injection technique with a high spatial accuracy, which allows an adversary to modify efficiently secret data from an electronic device. Experimental results demonstrate that several semi-permanent bit erase faults can be injected in code and data with corrupting flash memory, even with an X-rays spot from an X-rays laboratory source of less than 10 µm in diameter. This is the order of magnitude of 15 memory cells with a process node of 350 nm in the presented experiments. The article also presents the specificity of performing an X-rays attack without the need of a synchrotron-focused beam, as presented in CHES 2017 [1].