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BEATING THE HACKERS AT THEIR OWN GAME:

How to Protect Your Smart Cards from Unauthorized Access, Purchases, and Rides

Mitigate the risk and protect your hardware against side-channel attacks on secure elements.

Modern devices often rely on strong cryptographic keys, yet mathematical strength alone is not enough to ensure security. Attackers increasingly bypass cryptography altogether by exploiting physical leakages through side-channel methods such as Differential Power Analysis (DPA), Differential Electromagnetic Analysis (DEMA), and Fault Injection Analysis (FIA). These attacks are inexpensive to perform, difficult to defend against, and have become a serious threat to contactless smart card systems used in access control, payments, transportation, and digital identity.
This paper examines how DEMA attacks compromise smart cards in the real world and introduces a new, cost-effective protection approach that simplifies development while significantly strengthening device security.  

Fortify’s AES security evaluation by SGS

“Summary. The leakage analysis (Welch t-test) on over 30 million traces did not show statistically significant first- and second-order differences between trace sets with fixed and random inputs. The template-based DPA analysis, on the pseudo-random trace set for the profiling phase (15 million traces) and on a sub-set of 300k fix input traces for matching phase targeting the first-round S-box output, and template attack on ciphertext, did not indicate any potential information leakage.”

” The results for the soft IP presented in the report were obtained on the TOE which is the basic hardware implementation of the soft IP without additional levels of security (e.g. that are present in a secure silicon layout). Therefore the internal strength of the soft IP itself was evaluated. This indicates that the investigated features and parameters of the soft IP implementation should be robust against SCA and fault injection attacks in different implementations including ASIC. Nevertheless, according to the Common Criteria rules, the strength of the final composite product must be evaluated on its own.”

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