[117039] in Cypherpunks
Re: Project: Hardening Crypto Against Big Brother's "BlackBag"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sunder)
Wed Aug 25 16:37:52 1999
Message-ID: <37C450FD.9832063@brainlink.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 16:24:29 -0400
From: Sunder <sunder@brainlink.com>
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To: kurtbuff@lightmail.com
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Reply-To: Sunder <sunder@brainlink.com>
Kurt Buff wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
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> These two products are steps in the right direction...
>
> http://www.rainbow.com/ikey/index.html
Interesting stuff. Not too clear on how these work. But, if the values
stored on these keys are static, they won't need to do much work to capture
them, just like a keyboard sniffer, one could write a USB dongle sniffer and a
wrapper around the USB drivers of the machine to insert the same data without
actually having the dongle.
These suckers need to generate different data when they're connected. Data
that can't be replicated/forged.
Again, what's needed is a tamper proof device (tampering by physical access to
the device or by some means to bypass the device in the software of the
computer it's inserted in). This would require that the key do it's own on
board crypto and not rely for ANYTHING coming from the host PC, other than a
communication channel.
If the PC can copy the data in the key, you're fucked. i.e. they need to be
their own crypto engines, they can't just be ROM keys.
> http://www.rfideas.com/
This one looks a bit more like it would do this, but I've not found full info
on these to confirm that.
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