Smart cards chips -- originally invented as a protection for cryptographic keys -- are increasingly used to keep protocols secret. This talk challenges the chips' security measures to unlock the protocols for public analysis.
Hardened security chips are protecting secret cryptographic keys throughout the virtual and physical worlds. These smart card chips are found in banking cards, authentication tokens, encryption appliances, and master key vaults.
The protection capabilities of the chips is increasingly used to also keep secret application code running on the devices. For example, the protocols of modern EMV credit cards are not publicly known. Such obscurity is hindering analysis, hence letting logic and implementation flaws go unnoticed in widely deployed systems, including credit card systems.
We demonstrate a method of extracting application code from smart cards with simple equipment to open the application code for further analysis.
Karsten Nohl is a cryptographer and security researcher. He likes to test security assumptions in proprietary systems and typically breaks them.
Chris Tarnovsky is the principal at Flylogic. Their mission is to perform security risk analysis and assessment of semiconductors.