IP: - Biham/Shamir Differential Fault Analysis of DES, etc

John Gilmore gnu at toad.com
Fri Oct 18 16:46:19 PDT 1996


Note that this attack requires physical access to the DES chip, to
stress it so it will fail.  It works great against "tamper-proof"
devices such as smart cards.  It doesn't work against encryption
happening at any distance from the attacker (e.g. across the network).
It doesn't work against stored information like PGP-encrypted
email messages either.

However, it might be possible to use the attack by beaming disruptive
energies (heat, electrons, microwaves, etc) at a computer which is
doing a lot of encryption, while simultaneously monitoring that
computer's activity across a network.

	John






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