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Encryption not the way to tackle DStv: DOC

Government should make better use of regulatory tools and legislation to foster a more competitive environment in South Africa’s pay-television industry rather than requiring that conditional access technology be included in state-subsidised set-top boxes.

That’s the view of Solly Mokoetle, the head of the digital migration project at the department of communications (DOC).

“The issue of control access is that of pay-TV operators,” says Mokoetle.

Government’s role in the digital migration process, he says, is to ensure that it happens as fast as possible so that the “digital dividend” spectrum can be released to telecommunications operators for the roll-out of broadband.

South Africa’s digital migration project has ground to a halt as broadcasters MultiChoice and the SABC on one side and e.tv on the other battle each other over whether the set-top boxes government intends subsidising for 5m poorer households contain an access control system based on encryption.

E.tv and many black-owned prospective set-top manufacturers are in favour of encryption. The broadcaster says it’s needed to ensure that free-to-air players can get access to the latest content to compete more effectively with MultiChoice’s dominant DStv platform; MultiChoice argues it’s the wrong choice for South Africa and would amount to unfair competition as it would allow pay-TV players an easier entry into the market.

Earlier this month, government abandoned its commitment to access control, saying broadcasters could use encryption but that it would not be a standard feature of the subsidised boxes.

Mokoetle tells TechCentral that the main priorities for digital migration are ensuring that concerns with interference on South Africa’s border areas are dealt with; expediting the manufacture of set-top boxes; ensuring that the Post Office is able to deliver boxes timeously; making certain that installers are trained to install antennae and boxes; and making sure that those who have the capacity to manufacture set-top boxes are appointed.

Mokoetle says the policy agreed to by cabinet in December 2013 — under former communications minister Yunus Carrim — was not the final policy.

That policy was put out for comment for 30 days and the comments received were meant to be taken into consideration in drawing up a policy to be sent to cabinet for approval, says Mokoetle.

The amended policy was gazetted last Wednesday by new communications minister Faith Muthambi and is final, says Mokoetle.

He says government has erred by focusing on the issue of set-top boxes for so long. “We are going to miss the 17 June deadline.”

In terms of that deadline, South Africa agreed with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that it would terminate analogue TV broadcasts by that date. After 17 June, the ITU will no longer protect South Africa from radio frequency spectrum interference from neighbouring countries.

“We are trying to understand the implications of the ITU directives. Practically, we have established that the spectrum plan on analogue will no longer be protected — it will be wiped out. If you have any services running on that frequency you may interfere with your neighbours’ signal or vice versa,” Mokoetle says.

“South Africa cannot do anything about this but they [our neighbours] will have recourse with the ITU. However, the truth of the matter is that many of those countries themselves are not ready to move on digital migration. The problem is not from government, but will come from mobile operators wanting to launch LTE broadband services. We have established that one of the mobile operators in Lesotho will affect our transmitter network.”

Mokoetle was appointed as chief operating officer of the SABC in 2001 and has been involved in the digital migration process since 2004.

He was initially behind the SABC’s support of an encryption system (to collect licence fees), but this was later slapped down.

Mokoetle was appointed chief content operator of Telkom Media in 2007 and CEO of SABC in 2010. Since then, he has worked within the digital migration environment across Africa, having been involved in projects in Ghana, Uganda and Lesotho.

Encryption today: how safe is it really?

When checking your email over a secure connection, or making a purchase from an online retailer, have you ever wondered how your private information or credit card data is kept secure?

Our information is kept away from prying eyes thanks to cryptographic algorithms, which scramble the message so no-one else can read it but its intended recipient. But what are these algorithms, how did they come to be widely used, and how secure really are they?

Coded messages

The first cryptographic methods actually go back thousands of years to the time of ancient Greece. Indeed, the word “cryptography” is a combination of the Greek words for “secret” and “writing”.

For example, the Spartans famously used a system where they wrapped a piece of papyrus around a staff of a certain girth, and wrote their message down the length of the staff. When the papyrus was unravelled, the message was jumbled until it reached its destination and was wrapped around another staff of the correct circumference.

Early encryption algorithms like these had to be applied manually by the sender and receiver. They typically consisted of simple letter rearrangement, such a transposition or substitution.

The most famous one is the “Caesar cipher”, which was used by the military commanders of the Roman emperor Julius Ceaser. Each letter in the message was replaced in the encrypted text – the ciphertext – by another letter, which was shifted several places forward in the alphabet.

But over time such simple methods have proved to be insecure, since eavesdroppers – called cryptanalysts – could exploit simple statistical features of the ciphertext to easily recover the plaintext and even the decryption key, allowing them to easily decypher any future messages using that system.

Modern computing technology has made it practical to use far more complex encryption algorithms that are harder to “break” by cryptanalysts. In parallel, cryptanalysts have adopted and developed this technology to improve their ability to break cryptosystems.

This is illustrated by the story of the Enigma cryptosystem used by the German military during the Second World War, as dramatised most recently in the movie The Imitation Game.

Enigma’s relatively complex encryption algorithm was implemented using electromechanical computing technology to make it practical for German military communications. An extension of the same technology was used by the “bombe” machines of the British cryptanalysts to make it practical to break the cipher.

Current cryptosystems

The cryptosystems in wide use today have their origins in the 1970s, as modern electronic computers started to come into use. The Data Encryption Standard (DES), was designed and standardised by the American government in the mid 1970s for industry and government use. It was intended for implementation on digital computers, and used a relatively long sequence transposition and substitution operations on binary strings.

But DES suffered a major problem: it had a relatively short secret key length (56 bits). From the 1970s to the 1990s, the speed of computers increased by orders of magnitudes making “brute force” cryptanalysis –- which is a simple search for all possible keys until the correct decryption key is found –- increasingly practical as a threat to this system.

Its successor, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), uses minimum 128-bit keys by contrast, and is currently the most popular cryptosystem used to protect internet communications today.

Key problem

The AES also has limitations. Like all earlier cryptosystems, it is known as a symmetric-key cryptosystem, where the secret key is known to both the sender who encrypts the message (lets call her Alice), and the receiver who decrypts the message (lets call him Bob).

The secret key, being secret, cannot simply be exchanged over a public communication channel like the internet. If that was intercepted, that would compromise all future encrypted messages. And if you want to encrypt the key, well that produces another problem of how to secure that encryption method.

So, Alice and Bob must first use a private communication channel, such as a private meeting in-person, to exchange the secret key before they can use the cryptosystem to communicate privately. This is a significant practical hurdle for internet communications, where Alice and Bob often have no such private communication means.

To overcome this hurdle – known as the key distribution problem – an ingenious different type of cryptosystem, called an asymmetric-key, or public-key, cryptosystem was devised in the 1970s.

In a public-key cryptosystem, the receiver Bob generates two keys: one is a secret key that Bob keeps to himself for decryption; while the second is a public encryption key that Bob sends to Alice over a public channel. Alice can use the public encryption key to encrypt her messages to Bob. But only Bob can decrypt it with his private key. It thus provides a solution to the key distribution problem of symmetric-key cryptosystems.

In practical applications, due to the higher computational demands of public-key systems compared to symmetric-key systems, both types of cryptosystems are used. A public-key cryptosystem is used only to distribute a key for a symmetric key system like AES, and then the symmetric key system is used to encrypt all susbequent messages.

Consequently, the resulting privacy depends on the security of both symmetric and public key cryptosysems in use. The most commonly used public-key cryptosystems in use today were devised in the 1970s by researchers from Stanford and MIT. They are known as the RSA cryptosystem (from the initials of the designers, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman) and the Diffie-Hellman system, and make use of techniques from an area of mathematics known as number theory.

New bugs uncovered in encryption software

New bugs in the widely used encryption software known as OpenSSL were disclosed on Thursday, though experts say do not pose a serious threat like the “Heartbleed” vulnerability in the same technology that surfaced a year ago.

“Heartbleed” triggered panic throughout the computer industry when it was reported in April 2014. That bug forced dozens of computers, software and networking equipment makers to issue patches for hundreds of products, and their customers had to scour data centers to identify vulnerable equipment.

Cybersecurity watchers had feared the new round of bugs would be as serious as “Heartbleed,” according to experts who help companies identify vulnerabilities in their networks. The concerns surfaced after the OpenSSL Project, which distributes OpenSSL software, warned several days ago that it planned to release a batch of security patches.

“You need to take all vulnerabilities seriously, but I’m kind of disappointed. There’s been a week building up to this,” said Cris Thomas, a strategist with cybersecurity firm Tenable Network Security Inc.

The OpenSSL project released updates for four versions of the software, covering 12 security fixes for vulnerabilities reported to them in recent months by several cybersecurity researchers. The threats include one that makes affected systems vulnerable to so-called denial-of-service attacks that disrupt Web traffic, though none threaten the “crypto” technology used to encrypt data, Ristic said.

Ivan Ristic, director of application security with Qualys Inc, said he was not too concerned about the new bugs because most involved programming errors in a new version of OpenSSL, which is not widely used.

“It doesn’t seem a big story,” Ristic said. “I think people feared it would be bad, which is where all the hype came from.”

Yahoo Rolls Out End-To-End Encryption For Email

Back in 2012 (pre-Snowden!), we wrote about why Google should encrypt everyone’s emails using end-to-end encryption (inspired by a post by Julian Sanchez saying the same thing. Since then, securing private communications has become increasingly important. That’s why we were happy to see Google announce that it was, in fact, working on a project to enable end-to-end encryption on Gmail, though it was still in the early stages. In December of last year, Google moved that project to Github, showing that it was advancing nicely. As we noted at the time, one interesting sidenote on this was that Yahoo’s Chief Security Officer, Alex Stamos, was contributing to the project as well.

Thus it’s not surprising, but still great to see, that Stamos has now announced the availability of an end-to-end encryption extension for Yahoo Mail (also posted to Yahoo’s Github repository). It appears to function similarly to existing third-party extensions (like Mailvelope), but it’s still good to see the big webmail providers like Yahoo and Google taking this issue more seriously. It’s still not ready for prime time, and it’s unlikely that either provider is going to make this a default option any time soon, but offering more, better (and more user friendly) options to give everyone at least the option of doing end-to-end encryption is a very good sign.

It also raises a separate issue that I think is important: many have argued that companies like Yahoo and especially Google would never actually push for end-to-end encryption of emails, because it takes away the ability of those companies to do contextual advertising within those emails. But that’s an exceptionally short-sighted view. If Google, Yahoo and others don’t do enough to protect their users’ privacy, those users will go elsewhere, and then it won’t matter whether or not the emails are encrypted, because they won’t see them anyway. Focusing on the user first is always going to be the right solution, and that includes encrypting emails, even if it means slightly less ad revenue in the short term. Hopefully, Google, Yahoo and others remember this simple fact.

Can software-based POS encryption improve PCI compliance?

In the wake of the recent Verizon report that shows that 80 percent are out of PCI DSS compliance between audits, some vendors are urging the PCI Council to consider approving software-based point-to-point encryption, in addition to the current hardware-based standard.

PCI-approved, hardware-based P2PE allows merchants to drastically shrink the systems subject to compliance, reducing both risks and costs, and will make it easier to stay compliant.

Self-destructing hardware is a “security bonus,” but in general, hardware-based P2PE technology is not as useful for merchants, says Shift4 CEO Dave Oder, whose company is one of the largest software-based P2PE providers.

MORE ON CSO: What is wrong with this picture? The NEW clean desk test

“The vast majority of retailers who have P2PE in use today are using a software-based decryption method provided by Shift4 or one of our competitors,” he said.

According to Oder, software-based P2PE, combined with tokenization, is a secure alternative to hardware-based encryption, and should be allowed under the PCI DSS standard.”The trouble is, PCI is refusing to validate certain types of security solutions even though they are more secure and more useful to merchants than what is currently validated,” he said.

Hardware-based encryption creates a potential single point of failure and is not designed to handle the level of transaction volume and uptime required in the payments industry, he said.

“The PCI Council has not released a software-based P2PE standard that would allow for both decryption and key management outside of a hardware security module,” he said. “Much of the industry is waiting for that and the delay is harming merchants.”

According to Shift4 marketing manager Nathan Casper, merchants with no encryption at all have a self-assessment questionnaire with more than 280 requirements. Merchants with hardware-based encryption have one with just 19 questions. Merchants with software-based encryption get the 280-question form — but only answer those same 19 and put “not applicable” to the rest.

“The part that makes this frustrating to these large merchants is that they are almost always required to employ the assistance of a Qualified Security Assessor to oversee their assessment,” he said. That’s tens of thousands of dollars, or more, spent on someone checking the same “N/A” box 261 times.

Another vendor promoting a software-based encryption alternative is Irvine, Calif.-based Secure Channels, Inc., which offers both hardware and software-based solutions.

“There are software based solutions where the decryption key is hidden in the packet,” said Secure Channels CEO Richard Blech. “There are means contained in the software to have a secure key exchange that completely bypasses the need for a hardware security module. Merchants are being harmed without this solution.”

However, according to Sam Pfanstiel, director of solutions at Atlanta-based Bluefin Payment Systems LLC, there is an excellent reason to stick with the hardware-based requirement.

“Through software-based encryption, you’re performing encryption in memory, and that memory is highly susceptible to memory scraping,” he said. “That is a vector of attack that has been used in almost every cardholder data breach of the last 18 months.”

Hardware-based encryption, by comparison, puts the encryption mechanism — the plain text data — inside a hardware security module that self-destructs if tampered with.

“Bluefin stands firmly on the belief that only hardware-based encryption provides adequate controls to address the attack vectors prevalent in the industry today,” he said.

Bluefin used to be on the other side, he added.

“When the PCI standard was first released, we had a software-based solution in place, and had to look at what PCI was recommending,” he said. “We decided that the new standard represented better cardholder protection.”

Two and a half years and several million dollars of investment later, Bluefin has replaced its software-based encryption with hardware.

“Ease of deployment is only a concern for encryption providers who fail to comply with the new standards and continue to use older technology to perform their encryption and decryption,” said Pfanstiel.

Today, there are currently over 160 validated devices that support hardware-based encryption, he said. “And the list grows every day.”

Tired of forgetting your password? Yahoo says you don’t need one any more

Tired of forgetting your password? Yahoo says you don't need one any more

Passwords: easily forgotten, but also easily guessed. It’s a bitter irony that minutes can be spent racking brains trying to remember whether a required security question answer is a pet’s name, first school or place of birth – meanwhile a cyber-criminal is merrily typing in a person’s favourite colour and relieving bank accounts of hard-earned wages.

Well, now Yahoo might have made the process easier – at least when it comes to accessing email.

The Californian tech giant is rolling out “on-demand” email passwords, based around phone notifications, and eliminating entirely the need to memorise a fixed password.

Yahoo Mail now offers a service similar to “two-step verification”, a security measure employed by other email providers, but the difference is the removal of the first step.

The password system is opt-in and can be accessed from Yahoo Mail’s landing page. Photograph: Yahoo screengrab

Two step verification works by a user logging in with their usual fixed password, after which the email provider sends a unique code to their mobile phone, which is then entered on the login screen, allowing the user to access their email account.

Yahoo’s new security process will remove the need for users to enter a fixed password first, and instead just send a four-letter password to a user’s phone via text.

Unveiling the service at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, Yahoo’s vice president of product management for consumer platforms Dylan Casey said: “This is the first step to eliminating passwords. I don’t think we as an industry has done a good enough job of putting ourselves in the shoes of the people using our products.”

A blog post written by the company’s director of product manager, Chris Stoner, explains the steps:

1. Sign in to your Yahoo.com account.

2. Click on your name at the top right corner to go to your account information page.

3. Select “Security” in the left bar.

4. Click on the slider for “On-demand passwords” to opt-in.

5. Enter your phone number and Yahoo will send you a verification code.

6. Enter the code and voila!

The “on-demand” password service is opt-in and currently only available in the US.

Also announced at the festival was Yahoo’s forthcoming project on end-to-end encryption. Based on Google’s alpha Chrome PGP encryption plugin, Yahoo hopes to make the service available in autumn 2015.

Yahoo puts email encryption plugin source code up for review

Yahoo released the source code for a plugin that will enable end-to-end encryption of email messages, a planned data-security improvement prompted by disclosures of U.S. National Security Agency snooping.

The company is asking security experts to look at its code, published on GitHub, and report vulnerabilities, wrote Alex Stamos, Yahoo’s chief information security officer, in a blog post.

The plugin should be ready by year end, wrote Stamos, who gave a presentation on Sunday at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.

Yahoo and Google have been collaborating to make their email systems compatible with end-to-end encryption, a technology based on the public-key cryptography standard OpenPGP. End-to-end encryption is not widely used, as it can be difficult for non-technical users to set up.

The technology encrypts a message’s contents so only the sender and recipient can read it. A message’s subject line is not encrypted, however, and neither is the routing metadata, which can’t be scrambled since it is needed in order to send a message.

A video included in the post by Stamos showed how someone could set up an encrypted message much faster using the company’s plugin versus using GPG Suite, a software package for sending encrypted email on Apple’s OS X.

Yahoo vowed to improve its data security after documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden showed the spy agency had penetrated the company’s networks as well as those of many others, including Google.

Email encryption is one of a number of security improvements Yahoo and Google have undertaken.

In March 2014, Yahoo began encrypting traffic flowing between its data centers after information from Snowden indicated the NSA had access to those connections.

Google also encrypts connections between its data centers. Like Yahoo, the company has published its Chrome extension for end-to-end encryption on GitHub as well.

China backs off legal push that would force foreign tech companies to hand over encryption keys

“They have decided to suspend the third reading of that particular law, which has sort of put that on hiatus for the moment,” White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel said earlier this week, asnoted by Reuters. “We did see that as something that was bad not just for U.S. business but for the global economy as a whole, and it was something we felt was very important to communicate very clearly to them.”

If China has pressed forward, it could have put Apple in an impossible position. China is one of the company’s most important markets, but chief executive Tim Cook has staunchly opposed any attempts to violate the privacy of Apple’s customers.

While there are “rumors of us keeping backdoors and providing data to third parties,” Cook is said to have told top Chinese internet regulator Lu Wei during a meeting last year, the company has “never had any backdoors and never will.”

Cook was even more emphatic during an appearance at the White House’s Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection, held last month at Stanford University.

“If those of us in positions of responsibility fail to do everything in our power to protect the right of privacy, we risk something far more valuable than money,” Cook said. “We risk our way of life.”

Personal privacy is especially important “in a world in which that information can make the difference between life and death,” he added.

A similar set of Chinese government regulations aimed at companies competing for large-scale infrastructure projects has not been affected. Those guidelines call not only for backdoors, but also for companies interested in selling software or hardware to turn over their source code to the government.

How Encryption Software Works in Enterprises’Data Leakage-proof?

For modern enterprises, the trend in information computerization’s development means the data is not only the assets, but is the reflection of enterprise’s core competitiveness. To make your enterprises remain invincible in the fierce business competition, you should protect the sensitive and key data of enterprise effectively. In reality, data leakage will lead to economic losses or even more troubles.

With the development of Internet, the boundary between Intranet and Extranet is becoming blurred because the Intranet and outside world have been linked closely by Email and IMs. Traditional preventive measures like Firewall, Intrusion Detection and Anti-Virus appeared to be inadequate in the protection of sensitive data.

Why Enterprises establish Leakage-proof system

For enterprises, the internal data security is closely bound up with the enterprise security and normal operation of routine work. In some special circumstances, data security is the major part of business, directly related to the survival of enterprise. Based on this case, it is necessary to establish the relevant strategies, so that the effective leakage-proof system can be set up. Only in this way, the enterprise security can be ensured.

From the point of system value, it’s the question that data leakage in two areas, that is transmission and storage. From a security perspective, it needs a more comprehensive safety and preventive mechanism to realize the all-round protection. So how can we protect the enterprises’ data security fundamentally?

How encryption software works in enterprises’ data leakage-proof

To secure the data security of enterprise by the roots, it is suggested to choose a professional encryption software to encrypt data, because the encryption works on the data directly. As long as the encryption algorithm is not cracked, the data still remains safety.

Here an excellent encryption software called Best Encryption Expert is highly recommended, which supports features like file encryption, folder encryption, data shredding, folder protection and disk protection. Besides, there are various encryption types for users to choose. The encrypted files are copy-proof, remove-proof and delete-proof, in this way, the possibility of file leakage reduces a lot, while the security promotes greatly.

How to encrypt data with Best Encryption Expert

1. Download the software from official website or other download sites, and then install it.

2. Right-click a file to encrypt, and then choose Best Encryption in the system menu.

3. Enter the encryption password in the pop-up window, choose the favorable encryption type, and then click “OK”, that’s it.

Official download address: http://www.dogoodsoft.com/best-encryption-expert/free-download.html

Computer-stored encryption keys are not safe from side-channel attacks

Computer-stored encryption keys are not safe from side-channel attacks Figure A: Tel Aviv University researchers built this self-contained PITA receiver.

Not that long ago, grabbing information from air-gapped computers required sophisticated equipment. In my TechRepublic column Air-gapped computers are no longer secure, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology explain how simple it is to capture keystrokes from a computer just using spurious electromagnetic side-channel emissions emanating from the computer under attack.

Daniel Genkin, Lev Pachmanov, Itamar Pipman, and Eran Tromer, researchers at Tel Aviv University, agree the process is simple. However, the scientists have upped the ante, figuring out how to ex-filtrate complex encryption data using side-channel technology.

The process

In the paper Stealing Keys from PCs using a Radio: Cheap Electromagnetic Attacks on Windowed Exponentiation (PDF), the researchers explain how they determine decryption keys for mathematically-secure cryptographic schemes by capturing information about secret values inside the computation taking place in the computer.

“We present new side-channel attacks on RSA and ElGamal implementations that use the popular sliding-window or fixed-window (m-ary) modular exponentiation algorithms,” the team writes. “The attacks can extract decryption keys using a low measurement bandwidth (a frequency band of less than 100 kHz around a carrier under 2 MHz) even when attacking multi-GHz CPUs.”

If that doesn’t mean much, this might help: The researchers can extract keys from GnuPG in just a few seconds by measuring side-channel emissions from computers. “The measurement equipment is cheap, compact, and uses readily-available components,” add the researchers. Using that philosophy the university team developed the following attacks.

Software Defined Radio (SDR) attack: This comprises of a shielded loop antenna to capture the side-channel signal, which is then recorded by an SDR program installed on a notebook.

Portable Instrument for Trace Acquisition (PITA) attack: The researchers, using available electronics and food items (who says academics don’t have a sense of humor?), built the self-contained receiver shown in Figure A. The PITA receiver has two modes: online and autonomous.

Online: PITA connects to a nearby observation station via Wi-Fi, providing real-time streaming of the digitized signal.

Autonomous: Similar to online mode, PITA first measures the digitized signal, then records it on an internal microSD card for later retrieval by physical access or via Wi-Fi.

Consumer radio attack: To make an even cheaper version, the team leveraged knowing that side-channel signals modulate at a carrier frequency near 1.7 MHz, which is within the AM radio frequency band. “We used a plain consumer-grade radio receiver to acquire the desired signal, replacing the magnetic probe and SDR receiver,” the authors explain. “We then recorded the signal by connecting it to the microphone input of an HTC EVO 4G smartphone.”

Cryptanalytic approach

This is where the magic occurs. I must confess that paraphrasing what the researchers accomplished would be a disservice; I felt it best to include their cryptanalysis description verbatim:

“Our attack utilizes the fact that, in the sliding-window or fixed window exponentiation routine, the values inside the table of ciphertext powers can be partially predicted. By crafting a suitable ciphertext, the attacker can cause the value at a specific table entry to have a specific structure.

“This structure, coupled with a subtle control flow difference deep inside GnuPG’s basic multiplication routine, will cause a noticeable difference in the leakage whenever a multiplication by this structured value has occurred. This allows the attacker to learn all the locations inside the secret exponent where the specific table entry is selected by the bit pattern in the sliding window. Repeating this process across all table indices reveals the key.”

Figure B is a spectrogram displaying measured power as a function of time and frequency for a recording of GnuPG decrypting the same ciphertext using different randomly generated RSA keys. The research team’s explanation:

“It is easy to see where each decryption starts and ends (yellow arrow). Notice the change in the middle of each decryption operation, spanning several frequency bands. This is because, internally, each GnuPG RSA decryption first exponentiates modulo the secret prime p and then modulo the secret prime q, and we can see the difference between these stages.

“Each of these pairs looks different because each decryption uses a different key. So in this example, by observing electromagnetic emanations during decryption operations, using the setup from this figure, we can distinguish between different secret keys.”

Computer-stored encryption keys are not safe from side-channel attacks Figure B: A spectrogram

Any way to prevent the leakage?

One solution, albeit unwieldy, is operating the computer in a Faraday cage, which prevents any spurious emissions from escaping. “The cryptographic software can be changed, and algorithmic techniques used to render the emanations less useful to the attacker,” mentions the paper. “These techniques ensure the behavior of the algorithm is independent of the inputs it receives.”

Interestingly, the research paper tackles a question about side-channel attacks that TechRepublic readers commented on in my earlier article, “It’s a hardware problem, so why not fix the equipment?”

Basically the researchers mention that the emissions are at such a low level, prevention is impractical because:

Any leakage remnants can often be amplified by suitable manipulation as we do in our chosen-ciphertext attack;

Leakage is often an inevitable side effect of essential performance-enhancing mechanisms.

Something else of interest: the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) considers resistance to side-channel attacks an important evaluation consideration in its SHA-3 competition.