Nrf5340
Monthly
The nRF5340 SoC's on-the-fly QSPI flash decryption scheme for Execute-in-Place (XIP) contains a cryptographic architectural weakness that allows a physically-present attacker to undermine the confidentiality and integrity of externally stored encrypted firmware. Applications built on the nRF5340 that use external QSPI flash for encrypted XIP and rely on that encryption for firmware IP protection or tamper resistance are affected regardless of nRF Connect SDK version, as the root cause is in the SoC's hardware decryption block. No public exploit is identified at time of analysis; the weakness is intrinsic to the hardware architecture and cannot be fully resolved through a software-only patch.
The nRF5340 SoC's on-the-fly QSPI flash decryption scheme for Execute-in-Place (XIP) contains a cryptographic architectural weakness that allows a physically-present attacker to undermine the confidentiality and integrity of externally stored encrypted firmware. Applications built on the nRF5340 that use external QSPI flash for encrypted XIP and rely on that encryption for firmware IP protection or tamper resistance are affected regardless of nRF Connect SDK version, as the root cause is in the SoC's hardware decryption block. No public exploit is identified at time of analysis; the weakness is intrinsic to the hardware architecture and cannot be fully resolved through a software-only patch.