Chill Out: Freezing Attacks on Capacitors and DC/DC Converters

This paper introduces a non-invasive, low-cost, and trace-free capacitor freezing attack on DC/DC converters, which uses off-the-shelf electronics cooling sprays to rapidly decrease the capacitors' temperature. Due to the temperature drop, the converters are unable to maintain their specified output voltages, and their transient behavior changes. When the attack has finished, the temperature of the capacitors quickly returns to normal, while any evidence of the attack vanishes.