We have some questions about Chipwhisperer

Hello, My name is Jin Seok Park. And my major is IT convergence application engineering in Pukyong National University, Republic of Korea.
My team’s Goal is the implementation of side-channel attack basically. And we’re getting into preparing for Capstone design project.(Capstone design is meaning project for graduate.)
So we’ve been researching many articles and papers about side-channel attack. And also weve been searching for many companies which deals with side-channel attack to get advices. Finally we choose java card for attack target. But many difficulties about it. And we found your open project-Chipwhisperer, company-newAE. If you dont mind, we want to ask you some questions and get some advices.

Here are the questions.

  1. For now, we have smart cards, smart card reader and Bitscope. Is that possible to analyze smart card if we buy and use Chipwhisperer Lite board? Is it(the ONLY Chipwhisperer Lite) enough for attack?
  2. We tried to revise our smart card reader refered to your slides. But after that, it doesnt work anymore. Heres the picture about that situation.
    Can you find the problem in it? If you can, please advise us.
  3. Can you tell me the difference between Lite board and existing Capture Rev2 concretely?

Thank you for reading and i`ll wait for your answer :smiley:

Hello,

Sorry on the delay here - had been thinking about if the CW-Lite is suitable, finally got some time to write this out.

The current products don’t support Smart-Card triggering or I/O. There was some limited support for the SmartCards in the DPA Contest, but not generic smartcards.

Is there some issue like the wires are too high stopping the contacts from hitting? I’ve tried looking over that a few times but have trouble finding any other errors.

The CW-Lite uses a new USB interface chip, and a smaller FPGA. The analog front-end is the same with similar performance. The CW-Capture Rev2 has been effectively discontinued however, as some parts become unavailable, so future development will be based on the CW-Lite platform.

The other main difference is the CW-Lite doesn’t have IO translators, so only works at 3.3V. This is tricky for Smart-Cards which might work at 5V, meaning you can’t interface them to the CW-Lite without external translators.

Regards,

-Colin