Thursday, November 17, 2005

Rimmington Raises Concern

Dame Stella Rimington picks up on the forgability of all ID documents.

A reminder that the issue here isn't just the economic cost of replacing either cards/identities that have been forged, or of updating the fallible system. The real crunch is the false sense of security that such a system can provide - making the awakening all the more harsh when that failure is revealed in stony cold daylight.

In other words, how do we know the system is secure?

1 comment:

The Leadership Blogger said...

We don't know, because it isn't. I heard a minister saying the other day that they would have to have access to massive computing power to get through the security systems. Hmmm. I just bought a 1Gig mempry that goes on my keyring, my phone has the computing power of a moonshot, and my car could outhink a chess grand master. Do they think the crooks will freeze their technology? I will bet here, a tenner to a toss, that before the damn things are even proeprly piloted there will machines for faking the chips.
Look at this>
Bovenlander also told the Eurocrypt audience that microprobing attacks get harder when the feature size drops below one micron. However, there is a simple fix - to use a focussed ion beam to plate a nice large contact for the microprobe on each bus line. He showed a micrograph of a 0.8 micron chip treated in this way. He also related that undergraduates at Delft University routinely break smart card chips using microrprobe workstations, and as part of their assessed course work rather than as personal hacking. So it looks like the current version of Mondex (3101) can be broken by undergraduates. <<<

From http://jya.com/mondex-hack.htm