[1452] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Mondex Broken
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Young)
Wed Sep 10 00:32:22 1997
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 1997 22:07:10 -0400
To: cryptography@c2.net
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
We've received from anonymous a report on breaking
Mondex's pilot system by TNO along with a confidential
1996 memo describing the break:
At Eurocrypt this year TNO's Ernst Bovenlander gave
some details of these attacks (though he didn't mention
Mondex as the target). He showed an electron micrograph
of a fuzed link in a smartcard; while intact, this link
activated a test mode in which the card contents were
simply dumped to the serial port. The TNO attack was
to bridge the link with two microprobes. At the last RSA
conference, Tom Rowley of National Semiconductor
reported a similar attack on an unnamed chip using an
ion beam to rewrite the link .
Included is a letter from the Bank of New Zealand to
Electronic Frontier Canada attempting to suppress
publication of the memo.
http://jya.com/mondex-hack.htm
Perhaps Ross Anderson (and others) might comment on this
report, and if substantiated, relate its findings to other research
on tamper-resistant devices.
