Christopher Tarnovsky's Insights on TPM Attacks and Key Extraction

An American hacker has, with a great deal of effort, managed to crack a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) by Infineon. He was able to read the data stored on the TPM chip, for instance cryptographic keys (RSA, DES) such as those also used by Microsoft's BitLocker on appropriate motherboards. TPM hardware incorporates various levels of logical as well as physical measures designed to counter a range of attacks, such as differential electromagnetic analyses (DEMA) and even physical intrusions. Once the keys are retrieved, however, an attacker can read the encrypted data stored on a hard disk without needing a password.

Previously known as the smart card hacker, Christopher Tarnovsky of Flylogic Engineering has presented his work at the Black Hat DC security conference. He apparently managed to suss out a processor in the "SLE 66CLX360PE"PDF family used in the TPM. For this purpose, he extracted the actual chip from the housing in his special lab using various procedures that involved liquids and gases (a video about this is available online).

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