Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : WAVX Anyone? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Schmidt who wrote (4146)	10/9/1998 10:48:00 PM
From: 24601	Respond to of 11417

The Comdex website describes the exhibitor in booth #4122 this way: "Wave Systems is demonstrating elegant hardware-based solutions for metered electronic software distribution, computer security, and electronic commerce. The company's OEM partners are implementing Wave technology implementations for security and transaction processing requirements."

To: Paul Schmidt who wrote (4146)	10/10/1998 10:27:00 AM
From: Marty Lee	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11417

Paul.. Where do we fall in the greater scheme of things? The article was educational. It didn't specifically address the features of security provided by hardware encryption residing on the client side. Our Wave Chip would seem to fit into the “attempt to be tamper-resistant hardware” category. Although our design does have a built in complementary security mechanisms just in case the tamper resistance fails. The "timing attack… successfully implemented against smart cards and other security tokens, and against electronic commerce servers across the Internet” would seem to be countered by the Wave Chip's engineers having designed the code to move around the chip in different places and at different times smearing its own trail. Also, our Wave Chip casing might be “cracked” but only at the cost of erasing the information within (like breaking into a house with nothing in it). The article states, “Counterpane Systems and others have generalized these methods to include attacks on a system by measuring power consumption, radiation emissions, and other "side channels," and have implemented them against a variety of public-key and symmetric algorithms in "secure" tokens. We've yet to find a token that we can't pull the secret keys out of by looking at side channels. Related research has looked at fault analysis: deliberately introducing faults into cryptographic processors in order to determine the secret keys. The effects of this attack can be devastating.” Of course, we'll have to ask whether the article's authors have inspected the encryption machinery of a WAVX Meter and would want to bother with pulling out the secret keys in several million of them. Sincerely, Marty