Tamper Resistance

The security engineer needs to understand what tamper resistance is, and what it can and can't do. In this chapter, the author takes the reader through the past thirty years of evolution of attack and defence. The banking community realised that commercial operating systems were likely to remain insufficient to protect PINs, particularly from bank insiders, and decided to use separate hardware to manage them. This led to the development of standalone cryptographic modules or hardware security modules (HSMs). The chapter provides a few comments about the evaluation of HSMs. Each of the product categories discussed in this chapter, from HSMs down through FPGAs to smartcards, has a wide range of offerings with wide variability in the quality of protection. The security engineer will therefore have to pay attention to the many failure modes of systems involving tamper‐resistant processors that are more or less independent of the price or technical tamper‐resistance of the device.