Cracking the Smartcards

hanuman writes: "So you know you're a true hacker when: 'Breaking the encryption alone would cost up to $5m. The process demanded the use of ultra-expensive electron-scanning microscopes, with the team probing wafer-thin chips no bigger than a thumbnail. Each chip contained up to 50 layers, with each layer in turn carrying up to 1,000 transistors, every one of which had to be pulled apart and analysed.'." This is a follow-up to the Vivendi vs. News Corp. story with more details about what is alleged to have occurred. Update: 03/14 12:28 GMT by M : And yet another story, which alleges that the head of security at NDS funded the website that distributed the hack for their rival's smart cards.

Comments

Re:Not so hard

[swillden]

As a matter of fact, given that amount of money the simplest way to force the system is an exaustive search on the 3des keyspace (yes, 3des is the algorithm)

This part makes me wonder if you're trolling. Well, if so, I bit. Searching the 3DES keyspace is not currently feasible, and won't be for quite some time. 3DES has an effective keyspace of ~111 bits (it's 112, but the complement property of DES keys, plus a number of weak keys reduce it by 1 bit and change). That's a keyspace that is 70,368,744,177,664 times larger than the 64-bit keyspace that distributed.net has been working on for over three years, and 18,014,398,509,481,984 times larger than the one Deep Crack can search in a week. Actually, Deep Crack isn't really set up to attack 3DES (because it's infeasible and the EFF guys that build Deep Crack aren't stupid), but if it could, this means that finding a 3DES key would take, on average, 346,430,740,566,961 years. Of course, Deep Crack only cost $250K, and that was a couple of years ago, so more money and newer technology might be able to reduce that by a factor of 100 or so. Hell, assume you can do 1000 times better, Then you'd only need 346 trillion years.

112-bit keys won't be safe forever, but they'll be safe for the next decade or two at the very least, barring the discovery of flaws in DES, which has successfully stood against all comers for nearly 30 years.

Regarding power analysis, see my other post on why power analysis is dead. Timing analysis is similarly infeasible.