> Nothing deeply new here, but interesting anyway...
>
> http://www.
guardian.co.uk/idcards/story/0,,1950226,00.html
>
> Perry
Yes, a very interesting article. I hope people upstairs will
begin to listen
sooner rather than later...
I must repeat myself, but there is a solution already: VEST
(http://en.wikipedia
.org/wiki/VEST), a cipher/MAC/hash that is
specifically designed by Sean O'Neil to be as fast [and
small] as possible
in hardware while being as slow as possible in software. It
is physically
impossible to optimize even the smallest of VEST ciphers to
be less than
1000 times slower in software than it is in ASIC. Not even
with Intel
pipelining. What it means is that ASIC based RFID and
smartcard microchips
become physically impossible to clone without the use of
specifically
manufactured ASIC microchips that would cost at least $1mln.
Any
reprogrammable chip (FPGA, eFPGA, ProASIC3 etc.) must carry
the programming
logic and would have to be at least 5x5 mm in size and would
never pass as a
clone. Even a low-end 1MHz RFID chip would require at least
1GHz software
smartcard to emulate it. With the maximum 66MHz that exists
today, we can
sleep peacefully for much longer than those chips would
last.
Thus, possessing all the information and all the keys does
not give the
attacker an ability to make a clone, not without a million
dollars. And with
a million dollars I'm sure they could buy hundreds of real
passports in many
countries, so why bother cloning one?
Well, feel free to abuse me, but prevention of cloning is in
fact possible
by the use of such specifically designed ciphers and I've
discussed it
already with many leading cryptologists who all totally
agree with it when
they see the facts. I wish my colleagues (you guys) would
help me open other
people's eyes on it...
Ruptor
PS: I also totally agree that the protocol sucks. The chip
should never
respond unless it receives the correct key that only border
control
authorities should be able to calculate from their own
secrets and
machine-readable passport data, also hopefully using a
cipher like VEST to
prevent cloning... Challenge-response - either side doesn't
respond in
time? - The other one times out, good bye!
PPS: Not to be giving any legal advise to anyone, but AFAIK,
VEST is
actually not protected by any patents as the company claims.
It's free for
all to use. For example, the patent application that is
shown on the ECRYPT
web site (http://ww
w.ecrypt.eu.org/stream/vestp2.html) describes XMACC that
was published in 1995: htt
p://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~mihir/papers/xormacs.pdf
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