Using Voters May Lead to Secret Leakage

Abstract

The security of many digital devices strongly depends on a secret value stored in them. To mitigate security threats, high protection of such a value must be provided. Many attacks against (cryptographic) hardware as well as attack countermeasures were presented recently. As new attacks are invented continuously, it is important to analyze even potential threats to mitigate device vulnerability during its lifetime. In this paper, we report a novel voter-related vulnerability, which can be potentially misused to compromise the secret value stored in an embedded device.