Design & Reuse

NXP warns cryptographic keys can be hacked

Richard Wilson, Electronics Weekly
July 14, 2016

An encrypted key technology used to make hardware like mobile phones secure may not be as hackable as first thought.

A team of researchers from semiconductor developer NXP have shown that in fact it can be much easier than thought to extract the keys from a white-box environment.

Cryptographic keys protected by white-box software implementations are traditionally regarded as the best form of security. Keys can only to be extracted from white-box implementations by time-consuming reverse-engineering effort and complicated algebraic attacks.