An Observe-and-Detect Methodology for the Security and Functional Testing of Smart Card Applications

Smart cards are tamper resistant devices but vulnerabilities are sometimes discovered. We address in this paper the security and the functional testing of embedded applications in smart cards. We propose an original methodology for the evaluation of applications and we show its benefit by comparing it to a classical certification process. The proposed method is based on the observation of the APDU (Application Protocol Data unit) communication with the smart card. Some specific properties are verified as a complementary method in the evaluation process and allows the on-the-fly detection of an anomaly and the reasons that triggered this anomaly during the test. Here are presented two uses of this method: a simple use to illustrate the use of properties to verify an implementation of an application and a more complex illustration by applying the fuzzing method to show what we can obtain with the proposed approach, i.e. an analysis of an anomaly.