EAL stands for evaluation assurance level and is a certificate of security for IT products measured against a set of
common criteria portal.
How does a product get EAL certified?
It is assessed against a set of common criteria by an
approved agency. The developer of the system produces a security target (ST) document containing a list of features to be assessed. The ST is based on the criteria
here. The process is long and expensive, according to
wikipedia vendors were spending $1 - $2.5million to gain EAL4 certification in the 1990s.
What is required to meet the various levels?
The EAL process is broken down to cover the following aspects of a system: Development, documentation, life-cycle support, security target evaluation, testing, vulnerability assessment.
Each EAL level goes into slightly more detail, for example the "development" area at EAL1 requires a basic functional specification to be provided by the developer. EAL2 requires that same functional specification but expanded to include details of security enforcement. It also requires a security architecture description and a basic design.
An EAL4 certificate does indicate that the product was developed following good practices and has a well defined and documented architecture. These are clearly good things in terms of stability and security.
How about EAL 5+ chip used in software dongle?
The security of the smart card chip is actually guaranteed by the semiconductor manufacturers. Generally speaking, chips produced by manufacturers with greater strength are more reliable. Regardless of the varieties of chips, the most possible attacks these chips will encounter mainly include the following:
- Electronic attack (for instance, SPA and DPA);
- Probe attack (for example, SiShell);
- Dissection of chip;
- Debug port.
The principle of the electronic attack technology (SPA and DPA) is: when a chip executes different operations, the corresponding energy consumption also varies accordingly. Special measuring apparatus and math statistics technology are used to examine and analyze these changes to obtain the specific key information from the chip.
Method of probe attack: make direct data access to and from memory or data bus through the connection of microprobe with the key parts inside the chip.
Dissection of chip: obtain the chip’s circuit logic and connection status through the use of scanning electron microscope and exert reverse engineering to the chip.
Debug port: directly read out the key information by activating the debug port of manufacturers.
To protect the indongle data from the above mentioned cracking methods, the wise option is to choose high ranking dongle device in EAL. So far, only
Senselock produces the software protection dongle based on EAL 5+ chip which is NXP (Former is Philips) 16-bit smart card.
Is it worth buying EAL5+ products?
For companies that only has low priced software products, I would say the best solution is to use common single chip dongle or regular enveloper protection instead of spending too much on high-level dongle protection.
If your software is quite profitable to crackers, and once being pirated, the loss could be unbearable, then you do not have further option but choose the higher secured dongle in EAL.
After all the copyrights and source codes are the most valuable assets to the software company, not bunch of desktops and laptops.
