"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:
I was under the impression charges had associated fields which could be detected without physically touching the charged object. Silly me.
Uh huh.
Incidently, EEPROMs don't work by simply charging a capacitor or something silly like that. No insulator is perfect, no dielectric is perfect, and charge would eventually leak away were that the case. However, if it were, it would be fairly easy to determine the state of a cell without having to get particularly close to it. Beyond that, there is this insane notion you seem to have that a charged object will lose its charge if the "insulator" is "stripped off" -- I wasn't under the impression a vacuum, for instance, was a particularly good charge carrier.
Uh huh.
I believe you are operating on some sort of weird faith here rather than in reality. Reality is that even the extraordinarily well built circuits on the Capstone and similar chips that the NSA is trusting the Skipjack algorithm to aren't believed to be uncompromisable -- I believe the words were something to the effect of "it would take the resources of a national laboratory to reverse engineer" or some such.
Uh huh.
In any case, I don't care to debate this further. I am coming to believe very strongly that you just don't know what you are talking about.
High praise, considering the source. ----- Now I am certainly not going to waste any more time trying to explain solid state physics, how EEPROMs are put together, that the tamper-resistant packaging of Capstone is designed to thwart the reverse engineering of an algorithm contained on the masks used to make the chips, or impuning the supposed powers of "national laboratories." However, I will observe that whenever technology is put forth for criticism on this list, there are always a few people who insist upon maintaining that anything can be easily defeated. "All you have to do is <blank>" they exclaim, where <blank> may be replaced by "Quantum Factoring", "SQUIDs", "Scanning Tunneling Microscopy", "NP=P", "The EPR Effect", "Nanomachines", or some other exotic notion which would be lucky if it had even achieved a laboratory demonstration under carefully controlled conditions much less a practical application to the problem in question. Common to all such claims is a gross underappreciation of the engineering difficulties involved, in this case those related to reading logic states buried in a densely integrated digital device without destroying them. Something that isn't easy to do even if the device has been designed specifically for the purpose of permitting such observation in a laboratory environment. Such distractions, unfortunately, are why good physics rarely gets discussed in sci.physics, and why discussions on this list about nuclear bomb design, tampering, and hacking frequently take off in the crackpot direction. The bad eventually drives out the good, and few of the competent posters are going to continue to comment on a thread which has degenerated into the "You don't know anything. Mr. Squid can read your smart card and your brain waves too" level of interaction. Somewhere amongst all the noise here was the interesting disclosure that DSS had been compromised, and the beginnings of a good discussion about current "scrambling" protocols and their vulnerabilities. Let's see if we can recapture that discussion, and let the rants about obscure technologies magickally defeating all conceivable forms of tamper-resistant packaging drop. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $