Sergei Skorobogatov
More info
- Affiliation
- University of Cambridge
- Known for
- Optical fault injection, iPhone 5c NAND mirroring
Cambridge hardware researcher who keeps demonstrating, soldering iron in hand, what vendors insist cannot be done.
In 2002 Skorobogatov and Ross Anderson showed that individual SRAM bits on a chip could be flipped with a camera flash and a microscope. Optical fault injection became a field of its own, and his thesis on "semi-invasive" attacks filled the gap between probing a chip from outside and grinding it open.
In 2012 he claimed that Actel's ProASIC3, an FPGA used in military hardware, had an undocumented backdoor; the vendor called it a debug feature. In 2016, during the FBI's fight with Apple over the San Bernardino phone, he cloned the NAND flash of an iPhone 5c and restored it between passcode guesses. The FBI had said this would not work. His kit cost under $100.