Targeted Wearout Attacks in Microprocessor Cores
Originally published on ArXiv - Hardware Architecture
Computer Science > Cryptography and Security
arXiv:2508.16868v1 (cs)
[Submitted on 23 Aug 2025]
Title:Targeted Wearout Attacks in Microprocessor Cores
Authors:Joshua Mashburn, Johann Knechtel, Florian Klemme, Hussam Amrouch, Ozgur Sinanoglu, Paul V. Gratz
View a PDF of the paper titled Targeted Wearout Attacks in Microprocessor Cores, by Joshua Mashburn and 5 other authors
Abstract:Negative-Bias Temperature Instability is a dominant aging mechanism in nanoscale CMOS circuits such as microprocessors. With this aging mechanism, the rate of device aging is dependent not only on overall operating conditions, such as heat, but also on user controllable inputs to the transistors. This dependence on input implies a possible timing fault-injection attack wherein a targeted path of logic is intentionally degraded through the purposeful, software-driven actions of an attacker, rendering a targeted bit effectively stuck.
In this work, we describe such an attack mechanism, which we dub a "$\textbf{Targeted Wearout Attack}$", wherein an attacker with sufficient knowledge of the processor core, executing a carefully crafted software program with only user privilege, is able to degrade a functional unit within the processor with the aim of eliciting a particular desired incorrect calculation in a victim application. Here we give a general methodology for the attack. We then demonstrate a case study where a targeted path within the fused multiply-add pipeline in a RISC-V CPU sees a $>7x$ increase in wear over time than would be experienced under typical workloads. We show that an attacker could leverage such an attack, leading to targeted and silent data corruption in a co-running victim application using the same unit.
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Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Hardware Architecture (cs.AR)
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arXiv:2508.16868 [cs.CR]
(or arXiv:2508.16868v1 [cs.CR] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.16868
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From: Joshua Mashburn [view email]
[v1] Sat, 23 Aug 2025 01:54:21 UTC (620 KB)
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