Mahlzeit
On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 08:03:26PM -0800, David Corcoran wrote: > I've got Ben Laurie (yes, the famous Apache hacker) on another list > claiming that smart cards are weak storage for keying material. > e.g. that physical access to the card is all that is needed for a > motivated hacker to pry the key out of the card. I have never tried to crack a smart card or have much knowledge about the technical devices needed, but I have read quite a bit and had to do with cards, industry, etc.. My estimation of the situation: Smart card manufacturers try to make these as secure as possible, but smart cards are a cheap mass product. I do think, that cracking of smart cards is hard, but not impossible. And it is getting harder and harder, because there are are improvements in the smart card area regarding security, e.g. in the Infineon series 44 -> 66S -> 66P. (I'm most familiar with these ICs.) I do believe, that the 66P series from Infineon for at least some years secure against reading the content of the EEPROM by students and also more sophisticated hackers. This is because of the security features they have and because so many firms and government agencies do trust them. It would be very bad publicity for them if a card would be cracked. But I do not believe, that the 66P is secure against the laboratory and knowledge of e.g. Intel. For the 66S there seams to be not so much trust, e.g. the German signature cards from Telesec hat originally a 66S chip and were replaced by cards with a 66P. For the 44 there is, as it appears, even much less trust, thatn for the 66S. If you only want to read out a key, some form of power analysis would be enough. You need here not very expensive equipment. Card and OS manufacturers try als to be secure against this and they do apparently also try themself (or pay others to do so) to attack their cards with power analysis. My opinion is, that it is very difficult to do a power analysis attack with modern cards, but I am not convinced that it is impossible. What might make it impossible is to try to design a power analysis resitant protocol. E.g. with some sort of error counter. These are not definite answers. Here is probably a similar situation than in the cryptography area. but surrounded by non-openess. So my advice is to design a smart card application, that an attacker can not gain much value, and also to develop some plans what to do, if a card get's cracked. If there is interest, I can also write some about evaluation according to ITSEC/CC. Mahlzeit endergone Zwiebeltuete *************************************************************** Unix Smart Card Developers - M.U.S.C.L.E. (Movement for the Use of Smart Cards in a Linux Environment) http://www.linuxnet.com/ To unsubscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe sclinux ***************************************************************
