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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.
It immediatly destroys it's internal data when forced open.
Here's the link.
-... ---
there is very little tamper protection on smartcards due to their flimsy construction. you cant make a rapid zeroization system on something that isn't rigid and tough enough to be driven over repeatedly by a car or take the huge amount of abuse the human carrier provides every day.
except... dallas semiconductor long ago created the ibutton that is more secure and better than any smartcard..
(I know I sound like a broken record, but ibuttons are way better and cooler than any smartcard, and you as a home hacker can use them!)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Where's Adobe when you need them?
My sig sucks.
Your data's on Candid Camera (tm)!
The speed of time is one second per second.
All that needs to happen is for makers of smart cards to send money to Congresscritters to pass laws against smart card "circumvention devices" and have anyone making, selling or posessing a flash-based camera arrested.
Remember, when a security technology is comprimised you don't improve the technology, you outlaw anything that exposes its weakness.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
"Alex Giakoumis... said his company had built defensive measures into its products that would make them invulnerable to such an attack. However, he said he was unwilling to be specific about the nature of the security system."
However, it is speculated that the card contains material that can obscure the flash, literally achieving "security through obscurity."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
A few years ago I was told about similar technique involving elctron beam (or something like this). Generally, physical access to anything means full access to all contained infomation. Old security principle.
On the one hand it means no equipment may be trusted since it comes to customer's hands. On the second, I see no problem if I can rip the data which belongs to me (I know, it's generally not the case when it comes to SC). Smart Cards always have been security by obscurity for me. This lesson the industry never learns, I'm afraid.
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.
All they need to do is intertwine single wall carbon based nano tubes throughout the memory. When the camera flash hits the memory, the memory will self destruct.
There is no
They were able to expose the circuit to the light by scraping most of the protective coating from the surface of the microprocessor circuit that is embedded in each smart card.
With more study, the researchers were able to focus the flash on individual transistors within the chip by beaming the flash through a standard laboratory microscope.
Could they make the cards so that removing the coating destroyed the chip?
Ok, maybe everyone else on slashdot has a full clean room. I mean, it could be a possibility. But when I hear phrases like "focusing light on a single transistor" and "Wentworth Labs MP-901 manual probing station" I tend not to think of simple or easy to do. I'm not saying you couldn't hack one, I'm just asking what % of criminals are going to have access to a "manual probing station"?
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And if I'm not running an enccrypted filesystem on a hard drive, and someone steals the hard drive out of that computer, they can read the data. Now I consider this article's significance to be just another reminder that physical security is important.
(quoting from the linked article)
"The Pentagon (news - web sites) has armed soldiers with smart cards for online identity and physical access...Some of the information stored in the card is in the form of a number composed of ones and zeros that cryptographers refer to as a "private key." That key is part of a two-key system that is used to encode and decode information. The security of such systems is compromised if the private key is revealed. Typically, after the card holder authenticates the card by supplying a pin number, the private key will then be used to encrypt any sort of transaction using the card."
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Since laws only stop people who obey laws. Not people with a large enough incetive to benefit from sevurity circumvention.
Ah ha, a money laundering scheme, eh?
Wouldn't mind being able to do this to a DirecTV access card. Grab that juicy elliptic crypto key...
Seriously though, this works well for unlocking locked out cards, and reading the rom... but for other info that may be in a rom not directly accessible to the 8051 mcu, this isn't very valuable. Also, some of the nicest info, might not even be in a rom, but weaved into a crypto asic.
Still, if you can alter the value of a register with the microscope... could you actually read out by hand the values stored in a masked rom? Or reverse engineer an asic?
This could kick some serious ass.
This is a neat trick, sure but it's not a big issue.
:)
:).
This could ALREADY be done by anyone with a smart card reader already (which is cheaper than a camera and a microscope I might add!).
Duh!
Sensitive data on cards are stored encrypted using the readers public key. The data on the smartcard can be sent from the reader to a centralised location (over a network, much like the way credit cards are verified in realtime just now) and then decoded and verified by a central point (or a selction of central points for redundancy).
It's a given that the smartcard could always be read - this has been accounted for in design of secure systems that use smart cards (we'll the good ones anyway, addmittedly there are quite few which don't (there are a lot of muppets in this industry)
At a certain level every security measure in computer are from obscurity, you are safe because no one knows your password. But the problem arises when the design of the security measures must be made secret to keep it safe. I don't know if this is the case with the smart cards, or at least with all of them.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
...but not so easy to do without someone noticing. I mean, if you're going to have the Flash card in your possession long enough to perform the attack UNDER A MICROSCOPE, wouldn't it just be easier to yank the data with one of those smart-card reader/portable hard-drive things that ThinkGeek was advertising on here?
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
John Ashcroft could never be wrong...
tcd004
They can't do this from afar. They have to actually be in physical possession of your smart card, scrape the protective layers off, and put it under a microscope. The problem is that because smart cards are more "secure", they are trusted more, and so actual breaks in such security are harder to prove. So this is like an easy way to find out someone's PIN number once you have their ATM card.
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a manufacturer who had read the paper said it believed its products were not vulnerable to the attack.
A R.html?todaysheadlines
I love how the smart card manufacturing companies are just denying that this is a problem and saying that they've already looked at that issue. Do you really think they feel that way and have covered this problem already, or off the record they are panicking to find a way to fix the problem? I would guess that this is new to them, but that they don't want to admit their cards are vulnerable.
BTW, The story is taken from the NY Times, so if you have problems getting to the Yahoo! version of the story, try this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/13/technology/13SM
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
"We used duct tape to fix the photoflash lamp on the video port of a Wentworth Labs MP-901 manual probing station," they wrote in their paper.
No matter how high tech, there's no experiment that can't be improved with duct tape
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Lisa: Dad! The flash must have scrambled their circuits.
Homer: What are you, the narrator?
-- The Simpsons, Itchy and Scratchy Land, 2F01
Not sure we should go into much detail with this conversation here, but those DSS retailers are thieves, even by my admittedly low moral standards.
It would be like them, to have the tools to throw things wide open (and become modestly rich doing so) but hesitate because they are too short-sighted and want to continue with their status quo. They steal from DirecTV, and steal from the consumers too. My god, with average viewing habits, it costs as much or more to pirate the signal, than it does to just subscribe. And there is no hassle when an ECM strikes, either... how much is that worth?
Hypothetically though, let's say some guy uses this technique to grab that crypto key. That guy buys a $250 FPGA-PCI prototyping card. He loads pitou on the machine, to emulate most of the access card... and a crypto core from opencores.org onto the FPGA to emulate the asic. Boom. instead of driving 1-3 recievers off of a legit 3.5mhz asic, you'd have an FPGA running at 100mhz. No access card even necessary... and FPGA cards have legitimate uses besides pirating DirecTV.
God, I love being a hardware hacker. Even a no-good bum talentless hardware hacker, is better than not being one at all.
To do this he needs first to get physical access to the card, which is inside the phone (usually under battery). Having access to the phone, usually allow him to make calls anyway without complex card reading procedure.
A team of researchers from I.B.M.'s Thomas J. Watson Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., said they would present a report at the conference based on their discovery ...
Dmitri called. He said if you see any guys in cheap suits applauding on stage right, exit stage left.
From what little I know, any criminal who has been to jail has had access to a "manual probing station". IANAC (I Am Not A Criminal), but I think it's located in the showers.
-Sou|cuttr
One place I lived the laundry machines took a little plastic card with a black pattern on them. You stuck it in the machine, and it melted the card. That way noone could retrieve them. Only downside was the only way you could get more cards was to buy them off of the rooming house owner or the RA. If the RA was out all night, you were SOL and had to find a regular coin laundry.
Gorkman
You may want to read up on EMV. It is a cooperative initiative between Visa, Mastercard and Europay, and is set to roll out (region dependant) by 2005. Credit cards will be phased out soon after (by the aforementioned companies refusing to accept liability to fraud on non-EMV transactions).
EMV provides for online and offline transaction approval, mostly based on the size of the transaction and the running size of offline transactions since the last online one.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
You can't "read" the program data off a smart card... even with a reader. You can only read the output that the smart card povides through its interface. This would be the encrypted data which you can decrypt with the public key.
To get the program and data (private key), you have to be able to read the memory directly. This is not possible with a smart card reader. Hence, the attack with microscopes and whatnot.
You want the private key in order to ENcrypt data to be read by the smart card or the institution that issued it in order to fake the system.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Oh yes, agree of course, but no I am talking about smart cards (though depending on the use).
:-).
Encrypting the data on the card acts as a second layer, as the data on the card is encrypted by the card (as with, say a Sky TV card), but having that data itself also be encrypted against a public key and verifed by the device reading *as well* (which would be appropriate for something like say a secure door pass networked to a central server) would be appropriately secure (though biometrics would probably be more secure, if only they were reliable [HHOS]
By way of illustration:
*insert smart card in door pass*
Smart card: Hi, gimme some data I can use to authenticate you.
Reader: Here you are.
*Smart card churns over*
Smart card: Okay, here's some authentication data based on the input you gave me.
Reader: Cheers, let me check that data by decrypting it against my private key.
*Reader sends data to server*
*Server decrypts key, compares contents (a passphrase) against a stored hash of the users passphrase.*
Server: Yep, authenticates okay.
*Door opens*
This way, even if someone reverse engineered your card and built a reader, they could not get the data out unless they were also able to decrypt your authentication.
If the card supported writing data to, you could give it a key based on a onetime pad after authenticating them too, which would be really secure (meaing the card would have be used before it was reporting missing or compromised, as you couldn't then simply make one identicle copy and keep using it because it would of course change each time it was used).
I'm seeing a lot of very similar replies, so I guess I didn't explain it very well :-).
:-).
:-) Possibly just for authentication pherhaps....(though to be honest, that level of security would be be relevent in this particular instance :-)
Re posting this as a reply to myself so that more people will see it..
Encrypting the data on the card acts as a second layer, as the data on the card is encrypted by the card (as with, say a Sky TV card), but having that data itself also be encrypted against a public key and verifed by the device reading *as well* (which would be appropriate for something like say a secure door pass networked to a central server) would be appropriately secure (though biometrics would probably be more secure, if only they were reliable [HHOS]
By way of illustration:
*insert smart card in door pass*
Smart card: Hi, gimme some data I can use to authenticate you.
Reader: Here you are.
*Smart card churns over*
Smart card: Okay, here's some authentication data based on the input you gave me.
Reader: Cheers, let me check that data by decrypting it against my private key.
*Reader sends data to server*
*Server decrypts key, compares contents (a passphrase) against a stored hash of the users passphrase say (just as an example).*
Server: Yep, authenticates okay.
*Door opens*
This way, even if someone reverse engineered your card and built a reader, they could not get the data out unless they were also able to decrypt your authentication.
As a stage further, you could give the card a new 'key 'based on a one time pad after authenticating them too, which would be really secure (meaing the card would have be used before it was reporting missing or compromised, as you couldn't then simply make one identicle copy and keep using it because it would of course change each time it was used).
This *could* even work in something like Sky / OnDigitial boxes because they both already have modems which could be used to authenticate the new card (monthly, or yearly when a new card was inserted) but not obviously for realtime decoding of video data.
Of course:
:-)
:-)
Though to be honest, that level of security would be be relevent in this particular instance
Should read:
Though to be honest, that level of security would *not* be relevent in this particular instance
Well, I do this for the fun factor.
Yes, I agree that interpreting signals beamed onto your property is nothing evil or or thieving. Make no mistakes though, the law isn't on your side (not even in Canada anymore). What is even worse, apparently DirecTV has the technology to aim where they send this signal. I'm not sure how finegrained it is (doubtful that it can send to your neighbor subscriber, but not to you), but they no doubt improve it slowly just so the burden isn't placed on them. Much easier to buy laws.
Dealers though? Dealers ARE stealing. If anyone has the right to sell this signal, and I'm not sure anyone does have it, it most certainly is DirecTV's right, and theirs alone. Dealers aren't selling things at a modest price, so that they can make a living, or anything like that, they are profiteering. No excuses or justifications are possible. The very thing they are selling, is watered down, so they can continue to sell it longer, and jack up prices. That's why I would love to see some asic emulation VHDL show up anonymously on the web. Would destroy their access card black market, would make the supply for all practical purposes unlimited and just totally screw everything over.
Well for me it does. I work for a certain company that's trying to use smart cards in a certain product that shouldn't use smart cards but buzzword loving project managers don't want to use anything else... so anyway, I guess this will mean we have to scrap the whole smart card idea and start over on something else...
~ now you know
I read about the waitron pocket-scanner, too. Most of the waitrons I know wouldn't have been coerced, they would have done it for free drugs, which is how this was probably paid for. After the first couple of payments you'll either keep coming back or they'll use the past drug payments against you..
From the article:
"We've already looked at this area."
He said his company had built defensive measures into its products that would make them invulnerable to such an attack. However, he said he was unwilling to be specific about the nature of the security system, because such information would be valuable to someone who was attempting to break the security of the Atmel smart cards.
Great! They've solved the problem by adding a thin layer of obscurity! I feel secure now.
Awww, I thought those blew up too, just like the buckeyball-tubules....
If it's secure, but only because noone knows how it works, then it's inherently *NOT* secure. When will they learn?
OBSCURITY IS NOT SECURITY
*sigh*
If someone grabs your smartcard, why wouldn't they just *use* it. Or call the credit card company, tell them they're you, pass their rigourous security screening questions like asking for your social security number, and get a new card. Social engineering is a lot easier than tunnelling a flash with a microscope.
... it's a *key*. That's why you keep keys safe. Someone grabs my keys (those little jangly jagged metal things), they can use them, and if they have key duplicating equipment, they can duplicate my keys. Big deal.
Jesus
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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At this point, wouldn't it be prudent to just quit using that word for anything to do with computers?
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