'Creative Attacks' Beat Crypto -- Expert
Source: Security Focus
In 1998 cryptographer Paul Kocher developed a method for deducing the secret key embedded in a cryptographic smart card by monitoring tiny fluctuations in power consumption. Three years earlier, at the tender age of 22, he made headlines with a technique to compromise implementations of the RSA algorithm -- not with a direct frontal assault, but by watching the amount of time a system took to perform certain functions.
Speaking at the Usenix security conference in San Francisco Thursday, Kocher, now president of Cryptography Research, Inc., said creative attacks like these are only becoming more successful as hardware and software solutions grow increasingly complex and difficult to debug.
"Nobody breaks the crypto, they all bypass the crypto," says Kocher. "They are putting bigger crypto keys in there and it doesn't give you bigger security."
