From: mpd@netcom.com (Mike Duvos)
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 15:28:15 +0800
To: perry@piermont.com
Subject: Re: [NOISE] Nasty-Quibble-Punks
In-Reply-To: <199603312135.QAA20370@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <199604010006.QAA10270@netcom2.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:

 > I was under the impression charges had associated fields
 > which could be detected without physically touching the
 > charged object. Silly me.

Uh huh.

 > Incidently, EEPROMs don't work by simply charging a
 > capacitor or something silly like that. No insulator is
 > perfect, no dielectric is perfect, and charge would
 > eventually leak away were that the case. However, if it
 > were, it would be fairly easy to determine the state of a
 > cell without having to get particularly close to it. Beyond
 > that, there is this insane notion you seem to have that a
 > charged object will lose its charge if the "insulator" is
 > "stripped off" -- I wasn't under the impression a vacuum,
 > for instance, was a particularly good charge carrier.

Uh huh.

 > I believe you are operating on some sort of weird faith
 > here rather than in reality. Reality is that even the
 > extraordinarily well built circuits on the Capstone and
 > similar chips that the NSA is trusting the Skipjack
 > algorithm to aren't believed to be uncompromisable -- I
 > believe the words were something to the effect of "it would
 > take the resources of a national laboratory to reverse
 > engineer" or some such.

Uh huh.

 > In any case, I don't care to debate this further. I am
 > coming to believe very strongly that you just don't know
 > what you are talking about.

High praise, considering the source.

-----

Now I am certainly not going to waste any more time trying to
explain solid state physics, how EEPROMs are put together, that
the tamper-resistant packaging of Capstone is designed to thwart
the reverse engineering of an algorithm contained on the masks
used to make the chips, or impuning the supposed powers of
"national laboratories."

However, I will observe that whenever technology is put forth for
criticism on this list, there are always a few people who insist
upon maintaining that anything can be easily defeated.

"All you have to do is <blank>" they exclaim, where <blank> may
be replaced by "Quantum Factoring", "SQUIDs", "Scanning Tunneling
Microscopy", "NP=P", "The EPR Effect", "Nanomachines", or some
other exotic notion which would be lucky if it had even achieved
a laboratory demonstration under carefully controlled conditions
much less a practical application to the problem in question.

Common to all such claims is a gross underappreciation of the
engineering difficulties involved, in this case those related to
reading logic states buried in a densely integrated digital
device without destroying them.  Something that isn't easy to do
even if the device has been designed specifically for the purpose
of permitting such observation in a laboratory environment.

Such distractions, unfortunately, are why good physics rarely
gets discussed in sci.physics, and why discussions on this list
about nuclear bomb design, tampering, and hacking frequently take
off in the crackpot direction.

The bad eventually drives out the good, and few of the competent
posters are going to continue to comment on a thread which has
degenerated into the "You don't know anything.  Mr. Squid can
read your smart card and your brain waves too" level of
interaction.

Somewhere amongst all the noise here was the interesting
disclosure that DSS had been compromised, and the beginnings of a
good discussion about current "scrambling" protocols and their
vulnerabilities.  Let's see if we can recapture that discussion,
and let the rants about obscure technologies magickally defeating
all conceivable forms of tamper-resistant packaging drop.

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     mpd@netcom.com     $    via Finger.                      $