The following text correspondes to the "Project Summary" of SCARD's Contract Annex 1:

The threat of side-channel attacks is of crucial importance when designing systems with cryptographic hardware or software. Especially smart cards and related micro-chip systems have shown considerable vulnerabilities in this respect.

Side-channel attacks analyze and exploit the information produced by some system by, for example, measuring its power consumption or the electro-magnetic emanation of this system. From these traces the attacker can potentially make conclusions about the secret data involved in a computation inside the system. Meanwhile, simple power analysis (SPA), differential power analysis (DPA), and their related attacks, simple and differential electro-magnetic emanation analysis (SEMA, DEMA), became known to a broader public, and thus pose the biggest threat. In the following, we will refer to these side-channel analysis methods and related attacks by using the acronym SCA.

In SCARD, we propose to enhance the typical micro-chip design flow – from high level system description over register transfer layer description down to gate level net lists, and finally placement & routing of the micro-chip – in order to provide a means for designing side-channel resistant circuits and systems. Moreover, we intend to study the whole phenomenon of SCA in a consistent manner, and will also provide appropriate analysis tools and design tools for the designer of secure systems.

We consider these additional ingredients of the traditional design flow of micro-chips as necessary in order to enable the design of the next generation of secure and dependable devices.