Paper Tiger, an endless fight

International audienceRecently, researchers published several attacks on smart cards. Among these,software attacks are the most affordable, they do not require specific hardware (laser, EM probe, etc.). To prevent such attacks, smart card manufacturers embed dedicated software countermeasuresthat aim to protect the sensitive system elements. They design counter-measure to mitigate an existing attack with global view of the security.An affordable countermeasure must have a high coverage with a low footprint. For that reasons the design of a mitigation means is often a tradeoff between the memory usage and the effciency of a countermeasure. We present here a survey bringing to the fore the countermeasures usedto mitigate the attacks. We use the formalism of attack defense tree to have a synthetic and graphical view of the attack scenario