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| The IBM 4758 is an extremely secure cryptographic co-processor. It is used by banking systems and in other security conscious applications to hold keying material. It is designed to make it impossible to extract this keying material unless you have the correct permissions and can involve others in a conspiracy. An interesting research now shows how to extract the encryption key from this co-processor, which is commonly used in ATMs. |
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Credit:
The information has been provided by Mike Bond and Richard Clayton.
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It is possible, by a mixture of sleight-of-hand and raw processing power, to persuade an IBM 4758 running IBM's ATM (cash machine) support software called the "Common Cryptographic Architecture" (CCA) to export any and all its DES and 3DES keys to us. All we need is:
* About 20 minutes uninterrupted access to the device
* One person's ability to use the Combine_Key_Parts permission
* A standard off-the-shelf $995 FPGA evaluation board from Altera
* About two days of "cracking" time
The attack can only be performed by an insider with physical access to the cryptographic co-processor, but they can act alone. The FPGA evaluation board is used as a "brute force key cracking" machine. Programming this is a reasonably straightforward task that does not require specialist hardware design knowledge. Since the board is pre-built and comes with all the necessary connectors and tools, it is entirely suitable for amateur use.
Besides being the first documented attack on the IBM 4758 to be run "in anger", we believe that this is only the second DES cracking machine in the open community that has actually been built and then used to find an unknown key!
Until IBM fixes the CCA software to prevent this attack, banks are vulnerable to a dishonest branch manager whose teenager has $995 and a few hours to spend in duplicating the work.
The complete guide can be found at:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/descrack/
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