Mondex Broken

[John Young]

We've received from anonymous a report on breaking
Mondex's pilot system by TNO along with a confidential
1996 memo describing the break:

   TNO's Ernst Bovenlander gave some details of these 
   attacks (though he didn't mention Mondex as the target). 
   He showed an electron micrograph of a fuzed link in a 
   smartcard; while intact, this link activated a test mode in 
   which the card contents were simply dumped to the 
   serial port. The TNO attack was to bridge the link with 
   two microprobes. At the last RSA conference, Tom 
   Rowley of National Semiconductor reported a similar 
   attack on an unnamed chip using an ion beam to 
   rewrite the link .

Included is a letter from the Bank of New Zealand to 
Electronic Frontier Canada attempting to suppress 
publication of the memo.

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