EM Leakage of RFID Devices -- Comparison of Two Measurement Approaches

Security-relevant applications applying contactless communication technologies based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) need to be robust against side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks. This work compares two measurement approaches for evaluating the robustness of RFID devices against SCA attacks: Analogue demodulation and resolution optimization of the oscilloscope. Several distances for measuring the side-channel information have been evaluated showing that above a specific distance the resolution optimization outperforms the analogue pre-processing. By applying a pre-processing step, the results can further be improved. With an appropriate measurement setup the effort for a security evaluation can be decreased, further leading to faster time-to-market and reduced development costs.