On 25 Jul 2011 at 20:12, Werner Koch wrote: > For the v1 card you may want to have a look at the flylogic.net blog; they > have lots of entries about different chips. There is no specific entry > about the v1 card iirc, but I once sent them a few cards and they told me > it would be easy to read it out using their equipment. > > For a general overview on the grade of tamper resistance you may want to > start at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/tamper/ .
This subject is interesting and important, there have been deliberate attempts for many years to not tell the whole truth to the public about the security of "smart cards", be they financial type of cards or other. The public is only being told they are "totally secure" and also other info about the (in)security of associated systems are being withheld from the public or actively lied about. Even worse though, as I recall from the time when I worked with IBM crypto processors like 4758 etc, a lot of the people inside the (somewhat introvert) banking community working with security, had no clue and actually believed that DESX was unbreakable and that the PIN system couldn't be tricked or broken and a lot of other things that were not necessarily true. I remember reading Ross Anderson's comments on sci.crypt during the Citibank trials in UK with great interest and remember to this day a quote from him saying something about banking security people digging holes on the subject about PIN security - I found it insanely accurate and dead on, having my own experiences to compare with. I also remember when I organized a live TEMPEST lab session with a swedish military hw supplier, the IT people attending didn't even know what the phenomenon was about.. In the late 1990' there were academic reports being classified as secret in Sweden, that proved a great number of smart cards to be insecure. A number of those were swedish military graded equipment and hence government organizations like FMV (Swedish Defence Materiel Administration) and MUST (Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Service) quickly withdraw the papers from the open market. Only a handful of people outside the military have read those papers I'm told. Today I guess that there's nothing in those papers that the Cambridge people haven't covered..(?) I think that as long as you're in possession of the card the content is safe from any reasonable types of threats imposed by logical access from malware etc, as long as there is no bugs in the on-board OS.. If however it gets stolen by skilled advisaries, one should regard the keys as compromised, generate revocation certificates and new keys. What constitutes skilled advisaries and the likelihood of being targeted by such an organization can always be discussed though. As I understand it after having spoken to some government/military security people in Sweden there is no chip design on the planet that cannot be broken today. And if this isn't enough then its back to random numbers and one time pads I guess. But then.. when is it random enough..? Needless to say though, we should still use smart cards, since it's better than the alternatives, I think. /J > > > > Shalom-Salam, > > Werner > > -- > Die Gedanken sind frei. Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz. > > > _______________________________________________ > Gnupg-users mailing list > Gnupg-users@gnupg.org > http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
