A.: Power consumption profile analysis for security attack simulation in smart cards at high abstraction level

Smart cards are embedded systems which are used in an increasing number of secure applications. As they store and deal with confidential and secret data many attacks are performed on these cards to reveal this private information. Consequently, the security demands on smart cards are very high. It is mandatory to evaluate the security of the design but this is performed often very late in the design process or when the chip has already been manufactured. This paper presents a hierarchical security attack simulation flow for smart card designs where security attacks can be simulated in the processor specific model at transaction layer 1 in SystemC. Therefore, the power consumption profile is analyzed at this level. Preliminary results show that this analysis at high abstraction level can be used to determine vulnerabilities of the system to security attacks. Moreover, points to insert software countermeasures can easily be identified