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Chypothermia: Clock Freezing for Static Side-channel Attacks — arXiv:2609.11442

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11442
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-16T05:46:35.229Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 604104991841d9ee96e05dbdf9e0e5ab67c37ef38633664792ae70100795d42c
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_fba064eddd67

How to cite

Chypothermia: Clock Freezing for Static Side-channel Attacks — arXiv:2609.11442 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11442 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_fba064eddd67 (Metraipolis archive dc_fba064eddd67, sha256 604104991841d9ee96e05dbdf9e0e5ab67c37ef38633664792ae70100795d42c)

BibTeX

@misc{dcfba064eddd67,
  title = {Chypothermia: Clock Freezing for Static Side-channel Attacks — arXiv:2609.11442},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11442},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_fba064eddd67; sha256 604104991841d9ee96e05dbdf9e0e5ab67c37ef38633664792ae70100795d42c},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11442. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

Static side-channel attacks, which exploit halted-clock conditions to extract sensitive information, pose an increasing threat to chip security. To counter these attacks, various defenses have been proposed that monitor for abnormal clock behavior and trigger the clearing of sensitive data when clock anomalies are detected. In this work, we demonstrate that exposing a chip to cryogenic temperatures interferes with on-chip mixed-signal components, responsible for signal sensing and generation. Based on this observation, we develop Chypothermia, an attack that, without any electrical tampering with the system, disables the target clock sensor, the clock generation circuit, and the voltage sensors, while preserving the secret data. While effective at halting the clock, cooling is a slow process and, on its own, is often insufficient against systems equipped with temperature sensors designed to detect thermal anomalies. To bypass these protections, we combine Chypothermia with Chypnosis (Mitard et al., IEEE SP 2026) and show that, even within a moderately low-temperature operating range, this combination can halt the clock while evading detection. We implement Chypothermia on multiple FPGA/SoC platforms and demonstrate successful disabling of both soft-IP and hard-IP sensor implementations. Finally, we apply Chypothermia to the alert handler of the OpenTitan root of trust, which incorporates a state-of-the-art clock sensor, and show that the attack evades detection and prevents key zeroization. Finally, we introduce and implement an FPGA-compatible self-heating sensor as a countermeasure and demonstrate its robustness against Chypothermia.

Tema degli esploratori: fiducia digitale e crittografia (retro-catalogo arXiv: annunci del 2026-09-11 in cs.CR).
Categorie arXiv: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11442 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-16T05:30:39.393Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/catchup/cs.CR/2026-09-11?abs=True (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).