Of Boot Vectors and Double Glitches: Bypassing RP2350's Secure Boot

In August 2024, Raspberry Pi released their newest MCU: The RP2350. Alongside the chip, they also released the RP2350 Hacking Challenge: A public call to break the secure boot implementation of the RP2350. This challenge concluded in January 2025 and led to five exciting attacks discovered by different individuals. In this talk, we will provide a technical deep dive in the RP2350 security architecture and highlight the different attacks. Afterwards, we talk about two of the breaks in detail---each of them found by one of the speakers. In particular, we first discuss how fault injection can force an unverified vector boot, completely bypassing secure boot. Then, we showcase how double glitches enable direct readout of sensitive secrets stored in the one-time programmable memory of the RP2350. Last, we discuss the mitigation of the attacks implemented in the new revision of the chip and the lessons we learned while solving the RP2350 security challenge. Regardless of chip designer, manufacturer, hobbyist, tinkerer, or hacker: this talk will provide valuable insights for everyone and showcase why security through transparency is awesome.