Microwaving Your Smart Card-A Fraud Update
Two Israeli computer scientists have discovered security flaws in the chips used in many smart cards, raising questions as to whether they are tamper-proof. Adi Shamir, of the Weitzman Institute, and Eli Biham, of Technion, said common programs, such as Data Encryption Standard (DES), can be successfully attacked if a computer processor can be made to produce an error.
Such an error can be produced by heat or radiation damage, or by power-supply glitches. The Israelis wrote that they "can extract the full DES key from a sealed tamper-proof DES encryptor" by analyzing fewer than 200 encoded messages.
Smart cards are commonly used in Europe and are being tested in the United States. According to the New York Times, the smart card industry may have been aware of the flaw for some time. "But it doesn't mean that they have fixed it," said Paul Kocher, a Silicon Valley data security consultant.
