[lotuseclat79]

Secure computers aren't so secure.

Even well-defended computers can leak shocking amounts of private data. MIT researchers seek out exotic attacks in order to shut them down.

The encryption system that Tromer was attacking, called AES, was particularly vulnerable because it used tables of precalculated values as a computational short cut, so that encoding and decoding messages wouldn’t be prohibitively time consuming. Since Tromer and his colleagues published their results, Intel has added hardware support for AES to its chips, so that Internet encryption software won’t have to rely on such “lookup tables.”

In a statement, Intel told the MIT News Office that its decision “was mainly motivated by the performance/efficiency benefits achieved,” but that “in addition, there is a potential security benefit since these new instructions can mitigate the possibility of software side channel attacks on AES that have been described in research papers, including those discovered by Tromer, Percival, and Bernstein.”

Ok, now how old is my chip and does it have the Intel hardware support for AES? Gulp!

-- Tom

P.S. I will try to find out which chip series have the hardware support for AES and post it here - but, if you find out before I do, please do not hesitate to post the information yourself. Is it time to get a new motherboard already, or will my current motherboard be able to accept the chips with AES hardware support?

[SIR****TMG]

Wow