Side Channel Attacks on Smart Cards: Threats & Countermeasures

Abstract

Countermeasures against side channel attacks — e.g. power attacks, based on an analysis of the power consumption, or electromagnetic attacks, which are based on the measurement of electromagnetic emanation — play an important role in modern implementations of cryptographic algorithms on Smart Cards or other security tokens. This has led to significant higher efforts in the implementation of cryptographic libraries for these platforms. For getting assurance about the security, at least during two stages of the development process, additional measurements on the hardware platform become necessary. After giving a short introduction, this article outlines some of the current threats and possible countermeasures; another topic is to describe, how this problems influences the development process and the resource consumption of components which are appropriately secured against possible attacks.