Side channel attack prevention for AES smart card

Abstract

This paper describes an AES Smart Card implementation highly tamper resistant to side channel attacks. Smart Cards are gaining popularity in applications that require high security and store sensitive information. Modern Smart Cards, highly capable of complicated cryptology, provide a high assurance of tamper resistance and thus commonly used in payment application. Although advanced Smart Cards can not protect attackers from being defrauded by different side channel attacks. Small, embedded integrated circuits (ICs) such as Smart Cards are vulnerable to side-channel attacks (SCAs).We describe the development of differential power attacks and describe how to perform differential power kind of side-channel attack on an AES implementation, using simulated power traces. We also discuses the security prevention from such corresponding attacks, such as randomized masking techniques for software implementations.