Information security on chip technology
Prof. Avishai Wool and his student Yossi Oren of Tel Aviv University's School of Electrical Engineering have developed an innovative way of extracting information from chip technology. Secure chips are designed to keep encoded data safe, and are used in a variety of products from credit cards to satellite televisions.
Researchers have combined modern cryptology methods with constraint programming, an area of computer science designed to solve a series of complex equations. They discovered vulnerability inchip's power supply, because the amount of the power depends on the kind of information the chip contains. A potential hacker could decipher the information that the chip contains by measuring the power change. Only problem is noise removal, but researchers have now identified a method for blocking out the "noise" that has proved to be more effective than previous methods. Prof. Wool admits that no chip can be 100% secure, but it’s important to explore the boundaries of how secure information can be extracted from these chips. The research was presented at the 12th Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) in Santa Barbara, and original article was published on AFTAU web site. |
