Yesterday, I gave a talk at the SIT Smart Card Workshop in Darmstadt, a German conference on smart cards. It was my first appearance talking about Java Card 3, and the presentation was prepared on short notice. Still, there was a great welcome, although not everybody was convinced that this move was realistic. We’ll get back to that another time …
Just before me, Peter Laackman and Marcus Janke, from Infineon, gave a very nice introductory talk about current smart card attacks. They gave the talk in German, but I still enjoyed it very much, thanks to high-school German classes, slides in English, and above all, the exhibits and demo. We were shown wafers with and without active shield, and we noticed that the one with active shield is a better mirror (since you are not annoyed by the tiny details of the chip). We were also shown a spike-inducing little device, most likely used with Pay-TV cards. But the best part was a demo of fault induction. A chip was setup to generate a signal that would spmehow produce a sound of a given pitch. The chip was exposed to a strobe light, and the objective was to “derail” its execution, leading it to produce a sounf of a different pitch. After a few failures (the sound stopped completely, indicating that the chip had somehow crashed), it worked, and the entire room whoo’ed. Of course, the talk was also abount countermeasures, and we were also shown that the same attack did not work when using the appropriate light sensor.
Overall, although I did not learn much, this talk ended up being a very enjoyable introduction to smart card attacks and countermeasures.
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