Triple Exploit Chain with Laser Fault Injection on a Secure Element

This work presents three vulnerabilities identified in the ATECC608B secure element. This circuit is the latest silicon revision of the ATECC devices family, which is widely deployed in IoT devices. When chained, the three vulnerabilities exploitation lead to a protected secret data extraction from the secure element. For this work, three different commands of the chip are faulted with laser illumination. The first attack recovers internal secret EEPROM masking keys. With the knowledge of those keys, further attacks are leveraged: we show how authentication and session key generation can be hijacked with laser assistance to finally gain authorized access to a secret data slot. We also used very long laser pulses for our attacks in order to fault multiple memory accesses with high efficiency. Our study was done in a black box approach, and shows multiple exploit attacks using laser fault injection can be practical. In particular, this allowed us to recover secret data on a real test device.