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Weakness (CWE)

CWE-1278: Missing Protection Against Hardware Reverse Engineering Using Integrated Circuit (IC) Imaging Techniques

Base Incomplete

Information stored in hardware may be recovered by an attacker with the capability to capture and analyze images of the integrated circuit using techniques such as scanning electron microscopy.

More detail

These secrets may be stored in non-volatile memory or in the circuit netlist. Memory technologies such as masked ROM make it easier to extract secrets than One-time Programmable (OTP) memory.

How to prevent it (1 mitigation)
  1. Architecture and Design

    The cost of secret extraction via IC reverse engineering should outweigh the potential value of the secrets being extracted. Threat model and value of secrets should be used to choose the technology used to safeguard those secrets. Examples include IC camouflaging and obfuscation, tamper-proof packaging, active shielding, and physical tampering detection information erasure.

Source: MITRE CWE-1278

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  • Medium 6.2

    Missing Protection against Hardware Reverse Engineering Using Integrated Circuit Imaging Techniques for Boston Scientific Zoom Latitude

    An attacker with physical access to the device can extract the binary that checks for the hardware key and reverse engineer it, which could be used to create a physical duplicate of a valid hardware key. The hardware key allows access to special settings when…