[Updated 20 November 1996]

The announcement in late September by Bellcore researchers of an attack on smart card security based on causing failures in the card (see Cipher EI #17) has been followed by several papers on attacks based on introducing faults into crypto systems, one from by Biham and Shamir in Israel, another by a group of researchers in Singapore, and a third from Ross Anderson proposing a tamper attack on DES. "tamperproof" devices. In addition, Ross Anderson and Markus Kuhn have posted a paper documenting various kinds of attacks on tamper-resistant devices, including one successful attack on a smartcard currently in circulation. At this writing, the Bellcore paper still seems available only as a press release. Finally, Paul Kocher contributed a note to the RISKS forum suggesting that these kinds of attacks are far from new. [Added 18 November: Ross Anderson and Markus Kuhn released a new note on 15 November, which is available below.]

• Bellcore press release:
  http://www.bellcore.com/PRESS/ADVSRY96/medadv.html
• Biham - Shamir Differential Fault Analysis attack
• Anderson note on DES attack
• Anderson and Kuhn paper on the limits of tamper resistance:
  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tamper.html HTML
  http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/kuhn/anderson-kuhn-tamper.ps.gz (Compressed PostScript)
• Another New Attack to RSA on Tamperproof Devices by Bao, Deng, Han, Jeng, Nagir, and Narasimhalu: summary note.
• Paul Kocher's note to RISKS Vol. 18, No. 57.
• Improved Differential Fault Analysis by Ross J Anderson and Markus G Kuhn. From the paper: "In [1], Biham and Shamir announce an attack on DES based on 200 ciphertexts in which one-bit errors have been induced by environmental stress. Here we show an attack that requires less than ten ciphertexts. Furthermore, our attack is practical in that it uses a fault model that has been implemented in attacks on real smartcards."