Courtesy of Amir at Reconfigurable Computing...
Co-CPUS, and FPGAs in particular, are excellent crypto crackers. When I started thinking about using a co-processor as a security solution, I never thought of these applications. Crypto cracking is one of the few examples I know where the co_CPU is overwhlemingly faster than the x86 core. It helps that crypto cracking is really *just* an algorithm, while most of us use more complex applications.
It's worth reading Amir's summary and especially the video from Shmoo.
PS: I was off the conference circuit for a while. For those of you who know my personal life, it was an excellent extended summer vacation...
1 comment:
it's worth noting that the method of recovering the Mifare Crypto-1 cipher involved polishing away layers of the ASIC and using an automated circuit reconstruction algorithm to analyze microscopic images. A cryptographically encoded FPGA bitstream using a battery-preserved key is immune to this kind of attack, though it won't make a practical RFID.
The moral of the story is that if you rely on a secret/proprietary cipher your n00bishness may be publicly exposed.
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