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Definition
Tamper-resistant cryptographic modules are devices intended for applications that need to protect stored cryptographic keys and intermediate results of algorithms against unauthorized access.
Theory and Applications
The most popular portable form is the smartcard, which has the form of a banking plastic card with embedded microcontroller. The typical interfaces are either five visible electrical contacts (for ground, power supply, reset, clock, and a bidirectional serial port) or an induction loop. Typical smartcard processors are 8-bit microcontrollers with a few hundred bytes of RAM and 4–64 kilobytes of ROM or nonvolatile writable memory (NVRAM). Battery-like small steel cans (“crypto buttons”), CardBus/PCMCIA modules, and various PCI plug-in cards for non-portable applications are other popular form factors for tamper-resistant modules.
Smartcards are used in...
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Recommended Reading
Kömmerling O, Kuhn MG (1999) Design principles for tamper-resistant smartcard processors. In: Proceedings of the USENIX workshop on smartcard technology (Smartcard’99), 10–11 May 2009, Chicago, IL. USENIX Association, Berkeley, pp 9–20, ISBN 1-880446-34-0
Weingart SH (1965) Physical security devices for computer subsystems: a survey of attacks and defenses. Workshop on cryptographic hardware and embedded systems (CHES 2000). Lecture notes in computer science, vol 1965. Springer, Berlin, pp 302–317
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Kuhn, M. (2011). Smartcard Tamper Resistance. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_228
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_228
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