Design and Implementation of a Fault Attack Platform for Smart IC Card

Fault attack is a kind of attack that the attacker injects faults into the hardware and the secret key is likely to be revealed. The paper will describe a fault attack platform for smart card. This platform includes PC terminal serial console software, smart card interface circuits, and smart card reader fault attack circuits. Then the fault platform could communicate with the contact smart card or the smart card reader by complying with the protocol of ISO/IEC 7816. Using this fault platform, we can inject any glitches on power and clock when the smart card is running the encryption command. And then the fault attack platform can send wrong cipher text to the PC terminal console software through by serial port. We can analyze the fault data by MATLAB or software programming to crack the key of the smart card. So, the security of smart card could be verified. The glitch of voltage range could be from 0v to 5v. And the scope of clock frequency can be from 1HZ to 50 MHZ.