The paper showed how an X-Ray-focused beam can corrupt a single transistor in a semi-permanent state and how a simple heat treatment can reverse the corruption. It was named Best Paper at the international conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES).

A team from Leti's Information Technology Security Evaluation Facility (ITSEF) that included S. Anceau, P. Bleuet, J. Clédière, L. Maingault, J.L. Rainard and R. Tucoulou presented this paper titled "Nanofocused X-Ray Beam to Reprogram Secure Circuits" at the September gathering in Taipei, Taiwan.

Another Leti ITSEF team also presented a groundbreaking technique for non-invasively extracting sensitive data from microchips using machine-learning techniques. In their paper, "Convolutional Neural Networks with Data Augmentation against Jitter-Based Countermeasures – Profiling Attacks without Pre-Processing", E. Cagli, C. Dumas and E. Prouff explain how the networks provide an excellent tool to ease and fasten the data exploitation, avoiding information losses in the preprocessing phases.

CHES is the major conference in the field of Cryptography Hardware and Embedded Systems. It brings together nearly 500 experts from industry, government agencies and public research laboratories every year. These two papers illustrate the leading role of the Leti ITSEF in this domain.