Smart card introduction

A smart card, also called an IC card, is a standard-sized card with a micro integrated circuit chip such as a microprocessor and a memory. Smart cards must follow a set of standards, of which ISO7816 is the most important one. The ISO7816 standard specifies the appearance, thickness, contact locations, electrical signals, protocols, etc. of smart cards.

Smart cards can be divided into storage cards and microprocessor cards, as well as contact cards, contactless cards and dual interface cards, depending on the type of loaded chip and information and communication methods.

In general, for a smart card applied to a PKI application, a hardware true random number generator, an RSA coprocessor, and an RSA operation can be implemented in hardware. In addition, cryptographic algorithms such as DES and SHA-1 are also provided to ensure that key pairs are generated within the hardware and that addition and decryption operations are performed within the hardware.

From the perspective of the security features of smart card hardware, various security measures have been considered in chip design and manufacturing, such as preventing others from modifying data, etc.; the design of the chip's operating system (COS) has taken various forms in smart card data communications. Security measures. In the above security measures, various security algorithms, data encryption and other measures with extremely high strength have been adopted. In the application, various security measures such as user identification including biometric identification, user PIN code authentication, and interactive authentication of smart card and smart card reading and writing devices are adopted.

Any product related to security has the possibility of being attacked. Smart cards are no exception. For smart cards, there are several common attacks:

Physical tamper: Think of ways to expose the integrated circuit in the card, attach it to the surface of the chip with a microprobe, and directly read the contents of the memory.

Clock jitter: Let the clock work in the normal frequency range, but suddenly inject high-frequency pulses within a precisely calculated time interval, causing the processor to lose one or two instructions.

Over-range voltage detection: Similar to the over-range clock frequency detection, the processor is erroneous by adjusting the voltage.

For the above attack methods, smart card manufacturers have adopted a series of preventive measures: such as bus layering, flattening the chip, balancing power consumption, and random instruction redundancy.

Smart cards have been applied to banking, telecommunications, transportation, social insurance, and e-commerce. IC cards, financial IC cards, social insurance cards, and SIM cards in mobile phones all fall into the category of smart cards.