A Flexible and Accurate Energy Model of an Instruction-Set Simulator for Secure Smart Card Software Design

Smart cards are mostly used to process and store confidential and secure information. Several attacks based on power consumption analysis are known to retrieve this information. This paper presents the energy model of a cycle-accurate instruction-set simulator for secure software development. The model is designed to decouple instruction and data dependent energy dissipation, which leads to an independent characterization process and allows stepwise model refinement to increase estimation accuracy. The model has been evaluated for a high-performance smart card CPU and an use-case for secure software is given.

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