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Researchers’ response: Microsemi: Security claims with respect to ProASIC3 May 31, 2012 It was not our intention to make public disclosure at this time as the final paper “Breakthrough silicon scanning discovers backdoor in military chip” was due at CHES workshop in September 2012, where full details of our research will be presented. However, someone other than us posted the news by pointing to our very early drafts of the papers. As a result we had to release the current drafts of our papers so that people could verify our claims. We have contacted Actel many times about their security issues. This dates back to 2002 when they were warned about a vulnerability in their previous ProASIC devices to glitching and optical fault injection attacks discovered by Sergei Skorobogatov in 2001. In the following years Actel was warned about data remanence, side-channel attacks and optical fault attacks on their ProASIC3 devices. In January 2011 they were warned about Pipeline Emission Analysis (PEA) technique and the security problems we had discovered. We do not know why Actel did not follow up on the concerns we had raised. Our findings are true for all Actel/Microsemi 3rd generation Flash FPGAs/SOCs including ProASIC3, Igloo, Fusion and SmartFusion. These devices have two official security keys – AES and FlashLock Passcode (passkey) and an undocumented backdoor key which paves the way to access any undocumented security features inside the devices. AES key could help in extracting the embedded intellectual property (IP) but only with some restrictions. The passcode grants Flash memory access and reprogramming of the AES key. The backdoor key opens up readback of the configuration bitstream and other features. The AES key can be extracted with DPA attacks within minutes and with PEA in less than a second. The Passcode key would take years to extract with DPA attack methods, but PEA can extract it within hours. We used power analysis to find the