It sounds like a more cleaner method to obtain the keys versus using solvents and a lot of trial and error hardware. As described by Chris Gerlinsky with "How Do I Crack Satellite and Cable Pay TV?" [0] [1]
reply[0] https://simkl.com/tv/33956/chaos-communication-congress/seas...
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8127-how_do_i_crack_satellite_an...
> Getting lucky and drilling through a part of the enclosure that isn't directly protected won't help you if a barometric pressure sensor is tripped as a consequence of breaking the hermetic seal.
replyThat's interesting. I suppose if that technology is in use, the attack would have to occur in a pressure-controlled chamber, so breaking the seal wouldn't cause a change in pressure.
A more likely measure, which I recall seeing years ago, is to measure the impedance of the enclosure of the thing you want to protect. If someone tampers with it, you would be alerted. It works at many scales, from a protective metal mesh over your IC to a PC case.
replyAnd you'd need to have a way to know what the pressure inside is beforehand.
replyYou can find the pressure through destructive trial-and-error if money is no object - which it isn't for governments when the target hardware is juicy.
replyWhy would you make each device have the same pressure inside it? That's a bit like hardcoding the same password in each one. Any attacker is only going to have one shot on the actual device they care about no matter how much money they spend.
replyReally sounds very very easy for any lab that can measure molecular levels of gas.
replyEven a very sensitive pressure checker in a temp controlled sealed box would do it.
Your phone isn't going to have a "very high end HSM" any time soon. n
Not until you're paying mid range car prices or more for your very specialised secure phone (and then that phone will probably be factory backdoored AN0M-style).
replyAre any of these tamper-proof chips in my phone or laptop?
replyI expect typical smart cards like the one in your credit card are harder to crack than the raspberry pi was. Those cards are (or were) also used in TV set-top boxes and back in the day, there was a decades-long arms race between the chip makers and cable TV pirates. The TV pirates were also willing to make large expenditures to crack the chips so they could clone them and sell the clones. There's more about this in Ross Anderson's book "Security Engineering".
replyI’m actually curious now. Thanks, you’ve given me something to do this evening.
replySame. I wonder if my Yubikeys have anything to mitigate this sort of attack. My gut feel says that at their pricepoint and form factor, probably not.
replyI've also heard that the Google Titan security enclave chip (used in Pixel phones) is very hard to crack. Apple has something similar for Iphones, I believe.
reply> You need an optical path to the secure device.
replyAny path can be made into an optical path with a bright enough light. >smile<