A novel bus security solution for bank IC card with FPGA

Bank IC cards are now widely used all over the world, particularly in Europe and Asia, and in the meantime facing serious security problems. To protect bus in the bank IC card against attacks, a novel bus security solution including two methods are proposed in this paper to protect AMBA (Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture), which is used for interconnection between the 32-bit CPU and memories or cryptographic algorithms in the bank IC card SoC system. These two countermeasures including power balance by using 8B/10B to encode transmitted data in the bus to counteract power analysis, and by using CRC check to counteract fault attacks on the bus. Both of the methods have been simulated and verified on FPGA board. FPGA verification results show that 8B/10B decode notably decreases the characteristics of power, CRC can successfully detect faults injected into the bus in a ratio of 99.4%. These two countermeasures have been used in the bank IC card designed by our lab, as shown in Figure.1.