Comparison of two setups for contactless power measurements for side-channel analysis
Arthur Beckers, Benedikt Gierlichs, Josep Balasch, Ingrid M.R. Verbauwhede · 2018
When performing side-channel analysis of (passively powered) contactless devices such as RFID tags the side-channel signal is dominated by the carrier field used to power the device. This carrier field should be removed by the measurement setup in order to expose the power consumption of the target device and enable a side-channel analysis. In this paper we describe and compare two methods for measuring the power consumption of contactless devices. The comparison is done experimentally by running applets on a contactless BasicCard and evaluating the signal to noise ratio of the measurements collected with each setup. Our results show that both setups perform similar, indicating that more research is needed to investigate the differences and strengths.