Yup. It's not about being able to get on Melbourne trains for free, it's about being able to get access to your competitor's research lab, or to their mergers

Yup. It's not about being able to get on Melbourne trains for free, it's about being able to get access to your competitor's research lab, or to their mergers & acquisitions plans, or whatever. In that context, a few hours and a few thousand euros is absolute peanuts. I used to work for a DRM company, and the physical protections designed into those things (not near-field, just standard smartcards) was ludicrous. self-destruction on exposure to light. Measured to ensure that you can't detect good or bad keys by: thermal emissions, electric resistance, electrical consumption, time to respond, and rf emissions. All of that on top of the standard cryptographic requirements makes smartcard design an incredibly challenging proposition, and one that is ultimately futile in my opinion. For example, the last I heard from friends in the biz was that the crackers are still just using agregate measurements, but what happens when they start using high-res thermal imaging? You'll have to make sure that there is no special hotspot (or coldspot) on the chip when decryption succeeds. The same applies to RF emissions. Not easy.