Design and Implementation of an Electromagnetic Analysis System for Smart Cards

Information security is very important for the smart cards. Electromagnetic analysis (EMA) attack is a common method of side channel attacks which is a serious threat for the security of smart cards. So it is necessary to build a system to estimate the ability of the smart card to resist EMA attack. In this paper, an automatic EMA system for smart cards is designed and implemented. This system can measuring the electromagnetic field of smart card and can also carry out EMA attack. To verify the effectiveness of this system, an EMA attack was successfully carried out by it on a FPGA which 3DES cryptographic algorithm was loaded and implemented. 3DES is widely used in bank IC card and USB key. It is important to make sure of the safety of these financial IC cards. The experimental results showed that the applicable electromagnetic field signal can be traced to estimate the ability of the security device to resist EMA attack.