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Thursday, September 25, 2008
Hitachi Unveils Digital Signatures on Stand-Alone
Memory Chips
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Hitachi has made available anti-counterfeiting functionalities on memory chips without microprocessor such as memory cards, tickets or cartridges.
The Japanese company announced today the development
of a mechanism for attesting the authenticity of
memory chips using highly secure digital signatures.
Since the mechanism requires neither a CPU nor a
computational unit, high security can be attained at
a very low cost. As a result, counterfeited or
altered memory devices can be recognized as such,
with a wide range of applications, including memory
cards for digital cameras or handheld video game
consoles, cartridges for consumer products,
admission tickets or gift coupons.
In order to establish that digital contents are
authentic and have not been tampered with, digital
signatures usually involve cost-intensive
computations and require an important processing
power. For instance, in some schemes, large integers
with hundreds of digits are multiplied hundreds of
times using a powerful CPU. As a consequence,
conventional memory chips without CPU cannot handle
digital signatures and are confined to the use of
basic identification techniques based for example on
serial numbers. Moreover, adding a CPU with
sufficient processing power for digital signatures
to such chips would considerably raise their cost.
This is the original motivation behind Hitachi's
effort to develop a digital signature technique
which, for the first time in the world, does not
require any CPU and can be readily integrated in a
memory chip. In this new scheme, data required for
digital signatures is pre-calculated and stored in
memory. Later, this data is re-combined
appropriately in order to assemble a digital
signature. Unlike conventional digital signatures
which require an important processing power, the new
digital signature system can be realized in simple
memory chip.
Now, with Hitachi's technology, CHAP systems may be
used in applications where highly secure
authentication is required, at a low cost. In
particular, the digital signature scheme can serve
as building blocks for anti-copy and anti-tampering
mechanisms for a wide range of products, including
memory cards for digital cameras or handheld video
game consoles, authentication tokens, replacement
parts for consumer electronics, admission tickets or
gift coupons.
Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP)
is an authentication method where a verifier sends a
random challenge to a prover who replies with a
digital signature of the challenge.
The research results will be announced at the 9th
International Workshop on Information Security
Applications (WISA 2008) which will be held in Jeju
Island, Korea, from September 23 to 25, and in the
Second Workshop on Post-Quantum Cryptography
(PQCrypto 2008), which will be held in Cincinnati,
Ohio, USA, from October 17 to 19. |
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