Smart Cards Vulnerable to Photo-Flash Attacks?

belphegor writes "Researchers at the University of Cambridge have found a way to use a camera flash and microscope to extract data from smart cards. " Notable because its apparently relatively simple to do and really throws a monkey wrench into a variety of businesses that use smart cards to store important data.

Comments

So let me get this straight,

[Civil_Disobedient]

Lemme see if I understand right. Reverse engineer hardware to show its inherit ineffectualness -- that's ok. Reverse engineer software to show its inherit ineffectualness -- that's illegal.

Ok, just making sure.

Re:smartcards have always been lacking

[Jon Peterson]

OK, so smart cards are not tamper resistant. I don't see that any attack based around stealing a smart card is anything to worry about, assuming the card itself only stores dumb information like a sum of money or an id number.

Guess what?! Criminals can read the information from a credit card using nothing more sophisticated than their eyes! Does this render credit cards an appalling security risk? No, because when it gets stolen you report it and cancel the card.

Now, if someone figures out a way to _write_ to the smart card to people can top up sums of money or whatever, that's a problem. Also, if the smartcard stores data that's useful in itself - say your real naem and address, or other bank account numbers, or what have you, then you certainly don't want that being read by someone else.

Re:smartcards have always been lacking

[SignoffTheSourcerer]

This is really nothing new, many microcontrollers (like those used in smartcards) are vulnerable to different attacks, clock-glitches voltage reversals/spikes which may unlock their security features. Many of them are normally readable but are 'locked' by a fuse. This fuse may be reset by removing the UV protective coating and erase the card as an EPROM (this will ofcourse also destroy any data you wanted to read). There are however methods circumventing this, like using micro-film as masks for the UV-eraser, or using micro-probes to directly alter the bus. Many cards do not even have real protection, like the european pay-phone cards, all they are is a serial-EPROM which is burned a bit at a time for each credit, but they're fused so if you erase them (UV-wise) they will not allow you to re-program the low-area of the EPROM, but don't worry, just use som other blank card and copy it onto that.

Re:No worries, we'll just pass more laws...

[nolife]

This happened in the past with the padding of the cell phone industry. Analog mode cell phones send clear audio over the air in roughly the 868-890 MHz range. To protect the cell phone industry, the government passed a law in 1994 to prevent the sale of consumer radio scanners from receiving these frequencies. That worked for a while but many scanners were easily 'hacked' to get this region back. In 1997 the law was modified/changed to make it illegal to modify a scanner and companies had to produce scanners that were tamper proof.

These air bands were open to public ears for decades before the cell phone industry came to life. They chose to use "plain text" audio for analog transmissions to save money with no regard for your privacy. The government stepped in to bail them out when scanning these frequencies became popular and to give the public a false sense of security so they would buy more of them and keep the cell phone industry going strong.

It is also illegal to listen to analog cordless phones (46-49MHz/900MHz) but there is no law preventing the scanners from receiving these bands. I guess the cordless guys could not drum up enough soft money to get that through.