As new consumer appliances designed to access content or services emerge, and with them demand to incorporate more security functions, it's becoming crucial for chip designers to provide simulation tools to evaluate chips at the design level for possible leakage of confidential information, experts here said.

Panelists at the DATE 2004 conference here also warned that attackers use a variety of technologies to compromise the security of smart cards. They range from invasive and non-invasive attacks in hardware to software attacks such as buffer overflow and Trojan Horses that deliberately inject codes that can be hidden in a harmless and attractive program such as a game.

In implementing high-security smart cards, each link of the security chain needs to be carefully considered from hardware up to system architecture, the panel said.

By Junko Yoshida at EE Times.

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