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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 its secure element.

Use of cryptographic keys, which may be unbreakable mathematically or with brute force, does not necessarily protect devices from security threats and attacks, such as Differential Power Analysis (DPA), Differential Electromagnetic Analysis (DEMA), Fault Injection Analysis (FIA), and other side-channel attacks.

Side-channel attacks are relatively easy and inexpensive to mount against cryptographically protected devices but are especially difficult to defend against. In this paper, we consider DEMA attacks on contactless smart card systems, to name a few:

• physical access control (smart locks and key cards)

• digital passports

• payment cards

• chip IDs

• transportation passes

Hackers have found ways of breaking into smart cards, stealing money and services and gaining unauthorized access. A new approach to protecting smart cards against DEMA attacks is described, allowing manufacturers to cut protection costs and save time during development.

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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