1How to Make Smartcards Resistant to Hackers ’ Lightsabers?

Abstract—Cracking smartcards has always been a prized hobby, for the academic glory, for fun (ha, breaking the self-claimed unbreakable...) and for profit (ask the organized crime). State-of-the-art techniques include laser blasts that inject various transient or permanent faults in a program execution, potentially making the smartcard do whatever the attacker wants. After a brief recap of the attack tools and their effects, this article describes how the programmer can protect his/her code using software techniques ranging from cookbook recipes to tool chain automation and how (s)he can evaluate the robustness of his/her code by means of fault injection simulators. I