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Photonic power firewalls

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Abstract

This paper describes a new countermeasure against side-channel power attacks. We show that a conventional chipcard can be powered using an organic electroluminescent diode (OLED) facing a photovoltaic cell. By doing so, the card’s power consumption becomes constant and equal to the OLED’s power consumption. Despite size, energy conversion and heat dissipation issues, we believe that this countermeasure nicely suits several high-security applications. Because photonic power firewalls guarantee physical isolation, we recommend photonic firewalls for applications where energy and form factor considerations are not as important as security ( e.g., diplomatic encryption devices).

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Notes

  1. Note that Lasers may, however, severely damage sight.

  2. For an overview of different photovoltaic technologies, please refer to [13].

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  4. Battery-Backed Random Access Memory

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments and efforts toward improving our manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mines Saint-Etienne, CEA-Tech, Centre CMP, Departement SAS, F-13541, Gardanne, France

    Jean-Max Dutertre & Amir-Pasha Mirbaha

  2. ÉNS(DI), Information Security Group, CNRS, PSL Research University, F-75230, CEDEX 05, Paris, France

    David Naccache

  3. CEA-Tech, Centre CMP, Equipe Commune CEA-Tech - Mines Saint-Etienne, F-13541, Gardanne, France

    Assia Tria

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  1. Jean-Max Dutertre
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Correspondence to Amir-Pasha Mirbaha.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 2 and 3.

Table 2 Maximum power output of the illuminated photovoltaic cells facing the boosted OLED
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Table 3 Powering attempts for different smart cards using the photovoltaic cell’s energy
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Dutertre, JM., Mirbaha, AP., Naccache, D. et al. Photonic power firewalls. J Cryptogr Eng 12, 245–254 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13389-022-00291-0

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