Re: Australian "calculatorcard"

["E. ALLEN SMITH" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>]

From: vin@shore.net (Vin McLellan)

>        Could be one of seven or 8 vendors of so-called
"challenge/response" tokens or calculators.  Most of those sold in the US
and Australia use straight DES (and a token-specific key) to encrypt the
"random" challenge number in the token -- but it could be any secret-key
algorithm.
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	This is actually something cryptographic which I know a bit about,
so I'll tell you what I know. I had a suitemate a bit back who was working
for a local high-tech company as a computer programmer. He used a system
somewhat like this, but with some interesting permutations.
	The main difference was that it didn't use one algorithm. It used quite
a few, determined by a hashing of the challenge code. There were a considerable
number of challenge codes with distinct hash results that were never used. If
the card got too many of those (or too many wrong PINs), it switched to an
entirely different set of hashings and encryptions, all of which would warn the
server (thanks to their turning out something different in a hash function on
the server) that the card had been compromised. I suspect it would also wipe a
EEPROM that was storing the valid hash function and algorithms, but he wasn't
sure about that. It was all sealed in a plastic block to make sure it was
physically hard to reverse-engineer, anyway.
	-Allen