Research signals safer smart cards

[Vin McLellan]

Vin <me> wrote:

> >but descriptions of the effective
> >countermeasures (appropriate to single-chip environments) are new and
> >should be news

Sean Smith <sws at cs.dartmouth.edu> replied with a query:

>I haven't been following this as closely as I should.
>
>But what about Chari et al's techniques (and bounds proofs, if I'm
>not mistaken) in Crypto 99?

I should have been more precise.  I don't have the knowledge to dismiss any 
proposed countermeasures for DPA in smartcards.  Chari and others have made 
proposals that might be efficacious, in at least some situations. I simply 
don't know. What I wanted to point out was that several of Kocher's DPA 
countermeasures for single-chips environments have been published on in the 
last year, after the patents issued.

Cryptography Research also just started selling its DPA testing tools to 
evaluation labs and smart card vendors.   This Computerwire reporter 
apparently picked up the CR press release on the new products and -- in his 
blissful innocence -- dug into it to find himself awed by the elegance 
simplicity of DPA. (As we all were, weren't we?)

The new CR products were mentioned briefly at the end of the article.

What we probably have here was another young scribe who just learned to 
spell c-r-y-p-t-o. Unfortunately, he or she lacked an editor with the savvy 
to place the new stuff in an appropriate perspective... even when the wire 
story hit The Register, which usually has more clue.

Ralf was mostly right.

_Vin


"Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely potent, for
good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct, an idea, which by
its nature will resist efforts to restrict it to bureaucrats and others who
deem only themselves worthy of such Privilege."
_ A Thinking Man's Creed for Crypto  _vbm.

  *     Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin at theworld.com>    *
             22 Beacon St., Chelsea, MA 02150-2672 USA







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