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Researchers disclosed Chypothermia, a cryogenic physical attack that disrupts on-chip mixed-signal circuitry—including clock, clock-generation, and voltage-sensing components—to halt device clocks while evading defenses intended to detect abnormal clock stoppage. Combined with the Chypnosis static side-channel technique, it can leave registers and SRAM retaining secrets after digital protection logic and zeroization state machines stop operating; tests reportedly prevented key zeroization in platforms including the OpenTitan root-of-trust alert handler.
The attack requires physical access, controlled cooling or power manipulation, and specialized static readout methods such as laser logic-state imaging or impedance analysis. AMD advisory AMD-SB-8018 identifies Artix-7 and Kintex-7 FPGA exposure to this class of clock-freezing attacks and recommends programmable-logic clock monitoring paired with asynchronous reset. Researchers also proposed an FPGA-compatible self-heating sensor to help detect cryogenic conditions; organizations should assess devices holding bitstream-encryption or root-of-trust keys for asynchronous brownout, clock-loss, and temperature-response controls.
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Researchers submitted the Chypothermia paper, describing a cryogenic physical attack that disrupts on-chip clock-generation and sensing circuitry, including voltage sensors, without electrical tampering. Tests on multiple FPGA/SoC platforms reportedly disabled soft-IP and hard-IP sensors and, when applied to OpenTitan's alert handler, prevented key zeroization; the authors also implemented a self-heating sensor countermeasure reported to resist the attack.
Mitard and colleagues presented Chypnosis at IEEE SP 2026, using rapid voltage reduction to halt clock and protection logic while registers and SRAM retain data. The researchers reported extracting a secret key from an OpenTitan cryptographic module implemented on an FPGA in a single static side-channel trace, and reported bypassing a Microchip Flash-FPGA anti-tamper response.
AMD released security bulletin AMD-SB-8018 addressing this class of brownout-based static side-channel attacks. The bulletin confirmed that Artix 7-Series and Kintex 7-Series FPGAs were affected and recommended programmable-logic clock monitoring with an asynchronous reset mechanism.
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Multiple reports describe **Chronoforge**, a claimed timing side-channel attack against non-constant-time `ECDSA secp256k1` implementations running on Nordic `nRF52` and `nRF53` microcontrollers that use **ARM TrustZone**. The research says an attacker operating from the Normal World can measure microsecond-scale timing differences during signing operations and infer private-key material held in the Secure World, exploiting shared resources such as caches, branch prediction, TLBs, and performance counters rather than any flaw in `secp256k1` itself. The attack is presented as especially relevant to Bitcoin wallets, BLE wallets, IoT security tokens, and embedded HSM-like devices built on affected designs. The writeups also describe a framework called **VulnCipher** that allegedly collects timing traces, performs correlation-based analysis, and reconstructs private keys, with one source claiming recovery of a Bitcoin wallet key from a Nordic `nRF5340` target and publishing sensitive wallet details and attack metrics. Across the references, the recommended defenses are consistent: use constant-time cryptographic implementations, apply scalar and point blinding or masking, isolate caches and PMU access between TrustZone worlds, and harden firmware so Secure World secrets cannot be inferred through timing leakage.
Jun 29, 2026
Security researchers have demonstrated new hardware-based techniques to extract sensitive data from devices previously considered secure, including smartwatches and confidential computing servers. In one case, analysts revived the 'Blinkenlights' technique, adapting it to modern TFT screens to extract firmware from a budget smartwatch by exploiting a dial parser vulnerability. This allowed arbitrary memory content to be displayed on the device's screen, which was then captured using a high-speed Raspberry Pi Pico setup. The smartwatch, which contained fake health sensors and used a JieLi AC6958C6 system-on-chip, was found to have weak authentication and a flawed firmware parser, enabling the out-of-bounds read attack. Separately, researchers from KU Leuven University presented a low-cost hardware attack called 'Battering RAM' at Black Hat Europe 2025, which targets secure CPU enclaves such as Intel SGX and AMD SEV. By using a $50 DDR4 interposer, the researchers manipulated memory address mapping at runtime, bypassing firmware mitigations and gaining unauthorized access to encrypted memory. This allowed them to extract platform provisioning keys, forge attestation reports, and implant persistent backdoors on protected virtual machines, raising concerns about the security of cloud infrastructures relying on these technologies.
Jun 29, 2026
Researchers disclosed **DDrop**, an active DDR5 hardware-interposer attack that drops selected memory writes so stale encrypted memory values can be accepted as current. The flaw affects Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP because their scalable memory-encryption architectures do not provide memory-freshness protection. Demonstrated impacts include protected-VM memory disclosure, activation of Intel TDX debug mode, and forgery of launch-attestation measurements; on AMD SEV-SNP, researchers copied data between victim pages through page relocation. Exploitation requires an attacker to already control software on the target and obtain brief physical access to install a sub-$200 interposer, and no exploitation beyond laboratory testing has been reported. Organizations using confidential-computing workloads, including confidential VMs, should assess physical-access controls and attestation trust assumptions: the issue is architectural, has no straightforward software patch, and may require configuration or software mitigations that increase attack difficulty.
Sep 16, 2026