[4389] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: questions on AES analysis
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Murray)
Thu Mar 25 14:24:29 1999
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 10:00:22 -0800
From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>
To: William Allen Simpson <wsimpson@greendragon.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <11849.wsimpson@greendragon.com>; from William Allen Simpson on Thu, Mar 25, 1999 at 04:22:11PM +0000
On Thu, Mar 25, 1999 at 04:22:11PM +0000, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> I know I'm a bit out of the loop, as I have not been studying the AES
> submissions like the rest of you, but a couple of questions come to mind
> on reading the meeting reports.
>
> 1) Does the power analysis apply to all smart cards, or only those that
> draw from a reader?
Normal smartcards either get power from the reader directly
(i.e. 7816 contacts) or pick it up via an antenna for
contactless cards. Either way an attacker with physical access to
the reader can control the power.
> The reason that I ask is I know of a project where they want to
> build an entire IPv6 stack into a smart card, with kerberos and
> IPSec. But, I believe that the card has its own power supply and
> antennae. What are the constraints?
Yow! That doesn't sound like any smart card I know.
Does it have a display and keyboard and run WindowsCE :-)
Currently shipping 7816 cards max out at about 32k of FLASH
for program and data, and a few K of RAM. Most are 8-bit processors
but there's been some work on putting a 32-bit ARM in cards.
--
Eric Murray N*Able Technologies www.nabletech.com
(email: ericm at the sites lne.com or nabletech.com) PGP keyid:E03F65E5
