Active Coating

The art of physical protection of a chip against some attack is still in its infancy, and is currently probably the weakest point of the typical smartcard system. Reading out values from a smartcard¿s memory has been reported to be very easy given the knowhow of how to do this. With the expected broad distribution of smartcards this knowhow will most likely also spread, and misuses will happen more often. The main idea of the project is to cover the silicon device with an "active coating material". This material visually hides the chip and its properties are used by the hidden system to detect any change of this coating.