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Researchers find way to zap RSA security scheme

11 points by rosser 17y ago

zitterbewegung 17y ago
Researchers find a side channel attack on RSA.....
jrockway 17y ago
Ugh, reading mainstream articles about cryptography is painful. I like how they claim a brute-force attack would take "hours". I guess you can measure the lifetime of the Unvierse in hours... technically... Side-channel attacks are nice, but IMO, they are mostly good for breaking things like DRM. You cannot go to your bank's datacenter and measure the voltage the processor consumes while encrypting your transactions. You can, however, do that to your DVD player. So while real cryptography is not broken, DRM is. Of course, we already knew that.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Reading mainstream articles about X is painful. Only enjoyable if you are almost totally ignorant about X. Works for all X. Tells you something about the target audience of the mainstream media. How about a "Metajournalist" site? A Wikipedia-style site where we can collect all of these technical bloopers, listed by author?
- rmorrison 17y ago
  My favorite are still the perpetual motion machine articles that seem to hit Reuters and AP on a regular basis: "This black box, in Joe Shmoe's Nowheresville, Kentucky basement is going to solve all the world's energy problems. It's been powering his house for X months, and Joe says it can be adapted to power the whole world, while consuming absolutely nothing!"
cperciva 17y ago
Fault attacks on crypto are not new; but it's always interesting to see new variations. The world is not ending, but people who do crypto in hostile environments have another reason to be careful.
teilo 17y ago
Yet another alarmist title. No, RSA hasn't been zapped. Not even remotely close. For those not wishing to slog through this paper, here's what it amounts to: If you can get close enough to the hardware that is encrypting data, and have sensitive enough equipment, you may be able to grab enough of the data to break the encryption through various indirect means. Interesting, sure, but pretty much meaningless. It should always be assumed no system is secure when it is physically accesible by an attacker.

11 points by rosser 17y ago

Researchers find a side channel attack on RSA.....

Ugh, reading mainstream articles about cryptography is painful. I like how they claim a brute-force attack would take "hours". I guess you can measure the lifetime of the Unvierse in hours... technically... Side-channel attacks are nice, but IMO, they are mostly good for breaking things like DRM. You cannot go to your bank's datacenter and measure the voltage the processor consumes while encrypting your transactions. You can, however, do that to your DVD player. So while real cryptography is not broken, DRM is. Of course, we already knew that.

stcredzero 17y ago
Reading mainstream articles about X is painful. Only enjoyable if you are almost totally ignorant about X. Works for all X. Tells you something about the target audience of the mainstream media. How about a "Metajournalist" site? A Wikipedia-style site where we can collect all of these technical bloopers, listed by author?
rmorrison 17y ago
My favorite are still the perpetual motion machine articles that seem to hit Reuters and AP on a regular basis: "This black box, in Joe Shmoe's Nowheresville, Kentucky basement is going to solve all the world's energy problems. It's been powering his house for X months, and Joe says it can be adapted to power the whole world, while consuming absolutely nothing!"

cperciva 17y ago

Fault attacks on crypto are not new; but it's always interesting to see new variations. The world is not ending, but people who do crypto in hostile environments have another reason to be careful.

teilo 17y ago

Yet another alarmist title. No, RSA hasn't been zapped. Not even remotely close. For those not wishing to slog through this paper, here's what it amounts to: If you can get close enough to the hardware that is encrypting data, and have sensitive enough equipment, you may be able to grab enough of the data to break the encryption through various indirect means. Interesting, sure, but pretty much meaningless. It should always be assumed no system is secure when it is physically accesible by an attacker.