This essay investigates the role of cost in the development and production of secure integrated circuits. Initially, I make a small introduction on hardware attacks on smart cards and some of the reasons behind them. Subsequently, I introduce the production phases of chips that are integrated to smart cards and try to identify the costs affecting each one of them. I proceed to identify how adding security features on such integrated circuits may affect the costs of their development and production. I then make a more thorough investigation on the costs of developing a hardware attack for such chips and try to estimate the potential damages and losses of such an attack. I also go on to examine potential ways of reducing the cost of production for secure chips, while identifying the difficulties in adopting them. This essay ends with the conclusion that adding security features to chips meant to be used for secure applications is well worth it, because the costs of developing attacks are of comparable amounts to the costs of developing and producing a chip and the potential damages and losses caused by such attacks can be way higher than these costs. Therefore, although the production and development of integrated circuits come at a certain cost and security introduces further additional costs, security is inherently unavoidable in such chips. Finally, I additionally identify that security is an evolving concept and does not aim to make a chip totally impenetrable, as this may be impossible, but to lower the potential risks, including that of being compromised, to acceptable levels. Thus, a balance needs be found between the level of security and the levels of cost and risk.

中文翻译：

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成本在智能卡集成电路中安全功能集成中的作用

本文研究了成本在安全集成电路开发和生产中的作用。最初，我简要介绍了智能卡的硬件攻击及其背后的一些原因。随后，我介绍了集成到智能卡中的芯片的生产阶段，并尝试确定影响其中每个芯片的成本。我着手确定在此类集成电路上添加安全功能如何影响其开发和生产成本。然后，我将对开发针对此类芯片的硬件攻击的成本进行更彻底的调查，并尝试估算此类攻击的潜在损害和损失。我还将继续研究降低安全芯片生产成本的潜在方法，同时确定采用它们的困难。本文的结论是，为用于安全应用程序的芯片增加安全性功能是值得的，因为开发攻击的成本与开发和生产芯片的成本相当，并且可能造成的损害和损失这样的攻击可能会比这些代价高得多。因此，尽管集成电路的生产和开发以一定的成本来进行，并且安全性带来了进一步的额外成本，但是在这种芯片中安全性是不可避免的。最后，我还确定安全性是一个不断发展的概念，并不是要使芯片完全不可渗透，因为这可能是不可能的，但是要将潜在风险（包括受到危害的风险）降低到可接受的水平。从而，