
SRAM Has No Chill: Exploiting Power Domain Separation to Steal On-Chip Secrets
zdw
created: July 25, 2025, 10:47 p.m. | updated: July 26, 2025, 6:58 a.m.
This article introduces Volt Boot, a method for executing physical memory disclosure attacks on on-chip SRAM memories by exploiting SoCs’ power domain separation.
Memory power domain: This domain supplies power to the memories and their associated peripherals.
We can induce artificial SRAM state retention in any SoC that has separate SRAM and compute core power domains.
A simpler alternative is toggling SRAM power at reset, but this hardware-based solution is impractical for existing SoCs due to required hardware modifications.
In this paper, we show that current on-chip SRAM is indeed resilient against conventional temperature “freezing”-based attacks.
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