Be Afraid if Someone's Got a Voltmeter Hooked to Your CPU
Boy, do I hate it when a FLOSS project is given a hard time unfairly. I was this morning greeted with news from many places that OpenSSL, one of the most common FLOSS software libraries used for cryptography, was somehow severely vulnerable.
I had a hunch what was going on. I quickly downloaded a copy of the academic paper that was cited as the sole source for the story and read it. As I feared, OpenSSL was getting some bad press unfairly.
The first thing you have to note about such papers is that informed readers generally ignore the parts that a newbie is most likely focus on: the Abstract, Introduction and Conclusion sections. Unfortunately, these promotional parts of the paper are the sections that focus on the negative implications for OpenSSL. In the rest of the paper, OpenSSL is merely the software component of the experiment equipment.
The experiment described in the paper is very difficult to reproduce. You have to cause very subtle faults in computation at specific times. As I understand it, they had to assemble a specialized hardware copy of a SPARC-based GNU/Linux environment to accomplish the experiment.
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re: OpenSSL
Good but way toooooo long of an article.
To sum up...
"Likelihood of being cracked" is NOT the same as "can be cracked".