Paper Tigers: An Endless Fight

Recently, 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 countermeasures to protect the sensitive system elements. They design countermeasure 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 technique is often a trade off between the memory usage and the efficiency of a countermeasure. We present here a survey bringing to the fore the countermeasures used to mitigate the attacks. We use the formalism of attack defense tree to have a synthetic and graphical view of the attack scenario.