Nowadays, digital sytems are the main information support, in spite of the paper. This evolution implies a growing interest for the domain of cryptology regarding the conception of these systems. The hardware/software implementation has become the main weekness of security applications and hardware attacks, or "side channel attacks", like the DPA (Differential Power Analysis) for instance, have become standard. They are now identified as the most dangerous attacks, i.e. they allow ciphering algorithm keys obtention, like those used in our smartcard, with minor cost and effort.

In this context, the missions of this platform, supported by the "Région Languedoc Roussillon" and the "Université Montpellier 2", are to analyze the security potentialities of hardware platforms and embedded systems.