Electronic Frontier Canada's David Jones (djones@insight.dcss.McMaster.CA) posted the following to the EFC mailing list: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New in EFC's media archives: 1. Plastic treasure ... not so smart after all http://www.efc.ca/pages/media/guardian.24sep97.html This article reports that a team in the Netherlands made a "successful attack" on a Mondex chip (Hitachi H8/3101) by activating a test mode in which the chip dumps its contents to a serial port. John Beric, security manager for Mondex simply says "I have never SEEN a report saying they have broken Mondex". (Is this plausible deniability?? ;-) The article also makes mention of EFC getting hassled by the National Bank of New Zealand over a leaked memo. In the mean time, Mondex is trying to ramp up deployment of its new chip, the Hitachi H8/3109, which (for the first time apparently) implements public key crypto. 2. If cops can read E-mail, so can the bad guys http://www.efc.ca/pages/media/gazette.24sep97.html Some coverage of the "crypto" issue in the context of a major international privacy conference held in Montreal last week. EFC scored some coverage for its position statement on crypto: http://www.efc.ca/pages/crypto/policy.html including a quote in favour of strong crypto: "There is a far greater risk to individuals, businesses, and the government if we are unable to effectively prevent criminals from gaining unauthorized access to our records and communications." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------