CMOS Illumination Discloses Processed Data

Abstract

As digital devices penetrate to many areas important for the present society, it is important to analyze even potential threats to mitigate vulnerabilities during their lifetime. In this paper, we analyze the data dependency of the photocurrent induced by a laser beam in the illuminated CMOS circuit. The data dependency may introduce potential threat(s) originating in the nature of the CMOS technology. The data dependency can be potentially misused to compromise the data processed by an embedded device. We show that also the devices employing dual-rail encoding to hide data-dependency are not safe.