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A Smart Card is small portable physical device, typically flat and in the format of a traditional credit card (sometime much smaller: an example is the SIM card in a mobile phone), embedding: An Integrated Circuit with memory providing permanent data retention; that's using EEPROM, Flash, or FRAM in most of today's Smart Cards. Temporary coupling means ...

Would it be useful for companies who need to keep their data safe? No, a one-time-pad is only useful in very rare circumstances. The main issue is key-management. You can only use each pad once, it's as large as the data you want to encrypt, and you need to get it to all parties in a secure way. The direct competition of a one-time-pad is a stream cipher. ...

A pure algorithmic approach does exist, however it only provides a fuzzy bound. It is related to the proof of work / client puzzles I described in this answer. The signer will sign the message using a normal digital signature, and use the message and signature to instantiate a "cryptographic puzzle." A cryptographic puzzle is a moderately hard function ...

One-Time Pads only protect secrecy Encrypting with a one-time pad only protects the secrecy of the message. It does not protect the integrity of a message. An attacker can flip bits in the cipher-text and that will flip bits in the plain-text. To protect the integrity of the message you need some sort of Message Authentication Code (MAC). This can be done ...

325 MB/s is already good, i.e. you will not get much more with another implementation. Also, SHA-1 is a sequential algorithm, so multiple cores or a GPU will not help you. Specialized hardware is probably your best bet to make SHA-1 faster. (Also, if SHA-1 is the bottleneck then you are able to move data around faster than that, which is impressive; ...

Designing an HSM or other secure device is relatively easy; making it reliable even in the absence of adversary requires careful engineering; making it safe against adversaries with some level of physical access is hard; demonstrating that it is safe (for some definition of that) is even harder. One thing to worry about is integrity of stored data ...

If this is a good HRNG (look for security reviews) I suppose yes. But it would be excruciatingly slow (HRNG's are not known to be fast, generally you use them to get 256-512 entropy bits to seed a PRNG and go with that) and you still have the key exchange + reuse OTP problem. Note this tool apparently integrates itself with the Linux entropy pool, so I'm ...

For free software-based solutions on an x86_64, OpenSSL is the best around. Intel's IPP is purported to be 20% faster, and it's software-only, but it's not free (about 200USD, or 80USD for the academic version) and you have to fill out a form saying you're not from N. Korea, etc. There are hardware accelerators in the form of SSL cards/chips, but are ...

This page gives details of a successful extraction of a 3DES key from an IBM 4758 (FIPS 140-1 Level 4): http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/descrack/. In summary, it required 20 mins of access to the device, 2 days of (offline) cracking time, and about $1000 in equipment. Not sure if this quite answers the question you were asking in that it relies on ...

FIPS 140-2 Security Level 2 does not require any form of security measure to prevent extraction of secrets. It simply requires tamper evidence, that is, it should be possible to notice that such attack took place by looking (for instance) at some seal on the device or at a log file. To answer your question, extracting a secret may therefore take 0 seconds ...

As for goals, there are typically two that you would look to when implementing something on an FPGA: first, minimizing latency; second, maximizing throughput. To minimize latency, you would use the FPGA to perform a computation much faster than you could do on a CPU. An example here would be the DES cipher. DES is well suited for hardware and you can get ...

I recommend you read a bit more about cryptographic design before getting into design of a HSM. Designing a HSM is basically designing a cryptographic protocol. For instance, using AES-128-CBC is a bad idea, as it does not provide message authentication; instead, you should use authenticated encryption. Similarly, rather than deriving a derived key in ...

sufficient randomness The Whirlygig RNG -- and some other similar low-cost hardware random number generators a b -- have published schematics. Yes, such a hardware random-number generator gives more than sufficient randomness to produce one-time pads. It seems quite possible that this Simtec "Entropy Key" works just as well, although it's hard to say ...