Design Advisory for Zynq-7000: FSBL Authentication Attack

https://support.xilinx.com/s/article/76974?language=en_US

DESCRIPTION

In this physical attack, an attacker might 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 could further allow the attacker to perform additional attacks such as using the device as a decryption oracle.

The 7 Series families, including the Zynq-7000 SoCs, were not designed to be resistant to physical attacks. In the case where physical access and physical modification of the board are required to perform this attack, then the overall security profile of the Zynq-7000 does not change.

The below figure is a high-level summary that can be used to determine whether an existing system is impacted.

SOLUTION

A patch to the Zynq-7000 SoC FSBL will be included in the 2022.1 release that mitigates this specific issue.