In this physical attack, an attacker may potentially exploit the Zynq-7000 SoC First Stage Boot Loader (FSBL) by bypassing authentication and loading a malicious image onto the device. This in turn may further allow the attacker to perform additional attacks such as such as using the device as a decryption oracle. An anticipated mitigation via a 2022.1 patch will resolve the issue.

When booting a Zync-7000 SOC device from nand flash memory, the nand driver in the ROM does not validate the inputs when reading in any parameters in the nand’s parameter page. IF a field read in from the parameter page is too large, this causes a buffer overflow that could lead to arbitrary code execution. Physical access and modification of the board assembly on which the Zynq-7000 SoC device mounted is needed to replace the original NAND flash memory with a NAND flash emulation device for this attack to be successful.