Laser Beams & Light Streams: Letting Hackers Go Pew Pew, Building Affordable Light-Based Hardware Security Tooling
(en)
Patch, Sam. Beaumont (PANTH13R)
Stored memory in hardware has had a long history of being influenced by light, by design. For instance, as memory is represented by the series of transistors, and their physical state represents 1's and 0's, original EPROM memory could be erased via the utilization of UV light, in preparation for flashing new memory.
Naturally, whilst useful, this has proven to be an avenue of opportunity to be leveraged by attackers, allowing them to selectively influence memory via a host of optical/light-based techniques. As chips became more advanced, the usage of opaque resin was used as a "temporary" measure to combat this flaw, by coating chips in a material that would reflect UV.
Present day opinions are that laser (or light) based hardware attacks, are something that only nation state actors are capable of doing Currently, sophisticated hardware labs use expensive, high frequency IR beams to penetrate the resin.
This project demonstrates that with a limited budget and hacker-and-maker mentality and by leveraging more inexpensive technology alternatives, we implement a tool that does laser fault injection, can detect hardware malware, detect supply chain chip replacements, and delve into the realm of laser logic state imaging.