How to Make Smartcards Resistant to Hackers' Lightsabers?
Philippe Teuwen · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · 2010
Cracking smartcards has always been a prized hobby, for the academic glory , for fun (ha, breaking the self-claimed unbreakable...) and for profit (ask the mafia). State-of-the-art techniques include laser blasts that inject various transient or permanent faults in a program execution, potentially making the smartcard do whatever the attacker wants. After a brief recap of the attack tools and their effects, we'll see how the programmer can protect his code with software techniques ranging from cookbook recipes to tool chain automation and how he can evaluate the robustness of his code by means of fault injection simulators.