On Fri, 31 Dec 2010, Peter Gutmann wrote: > The whole talk (in three parts) is fascinating viewing, particularly the > summary of jailbreaking of embedded devices: > > - Pretty much all of the (public) jailbreaks were to get Linux or other > software onto the device, not for piracy. > > - All the devices were hacked in anything from one week to twelve months (the > record, for the Xbox360). > > - Most of them used crypto, and AFAICT in none of them was the crypto > directly > broken (Shamir's Law, crypto is bypassed not attacked).
I completely agree with Peter's general points, but there is at least one jailbreak where the crypto was directly broken: the TI-83 series of graphing calculators. The jailbreakers used a distributed factoring project to factor the 512-bit RSA keys burnt into the calculators' ROMs. (I think this counts as "breaking the crypto".) -- -- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <[email protected]> Dept of Astronomy, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." -- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
