Reverse Engineering of Integrated Circuits/smart Cards
Reverse engineering is an invasive and destructive form of analyzing a smart card. The attacker grinds away layer by layer of the smart card and takes pictures with an electron microscope. With this technique, it is possible to reveal the complete hardware and software part of the smart card. The major problem for the attacker is to bring everything into the right order to find out how everything works. Engineers try to hide keys and operations by mixing up memory positions, for example, bus scrambling. In some cases, it is even possible to attach a probe to measure voltages while the smart card is still operational. Engineers employ sensors to detect and prevent this attack. This attack is not very common because it requires a large investment in effort and special equipment that is generally only available to large chip manufacturers. Furthermore, the payoff from this attack is low since other security techniques are often employed such as shadow accounts.
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Famous quotes containing the words reverse, engineering, integrated, circuits, smart and/or cards:
“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
—Bible: Hebrew Isaiah, 2:4.
The words reappear in Micah 4:3, and the reverse injunction is made in Joel 3:10 (”Beat your plowshares into swords ...”)
“Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in San Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.”
—Merle Colby, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Science is intimately integrated with the whole social structure and cultural tradition. They mutually support one other—only in certain types of society can science flourish, and conversely without a continuous and healthy development and application of science such a society cannot function properly.”
—Talcott Parsons (1902–1979)
“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)
“Jefferson Smith: If you thought as much as being honest as you do of being smart ...
Diz: Honest? Why, we’re the only ones who can afford to be honest in what we tell the voters. We don’t have to be re-elected like politicians.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“But cards are war, in disguise of a sport.”
—Charles Lamb (1775–1834)