International Business Machines Corporation

Helmut Scherzer

Pankaj Rohatgi

Josyula R Rao

Suresh N Chari

Vincenzo Valentino DiLuoffo

Elaine Rivette Palmer

Paul Ashley Karger

Michael Steiner

Tal D Rabin

David Claude Toll

Bruce Roy Archambeault

Philippe A Janson

Albert Schaal

Michael Schilling

A method, system, and computer-usable medium for operating a mobile computer system. In response to receiving a write request, a control system attempts to write data associated with said write request to a non-volatile memory cache coupled to said hard disk drive. In response to determining the non-volatile memory cache cannot accommodate the data, the control system starts the hard disk drive. The control system writes contents of the non-volatile memory cache to the hard disk drive, after starting the hard disk drive. In response to determining the non-volatile memory cache can accommodate said data, the control system writes the data to the non-volatile memory cache.

Method and system of conserving battery power in a mobile computer system

A random number generator (RNG) resistant to side channel attacks includes an activation pseudo random number generator (APRNG) having an activation output connected to an activation seed input to provide a next seed to the activation seed input. A second random number generator includes a second seed input, which receives the next seed and a random data output, which outputs random data in accordance with the next seed. An input seed memory is connected to the activation seed input and a feedback connection from the activation output so that the next seed is stored in the input seed memory to be used by the APRNG as the activation seed input at a next startup cycle.

Method, apparatus and system for resistance to side channel attacks on random number generators

The present invention relates to an electronic purse data carrier for performing monetary transactions and a method for managing electronic payments with such a carrier. The purse stores one or more payment units each having a respective monetary value, whereby each of said payment units has a respective unique payment unit-ID and comprises an age information evaluable for delimiting the use of it. In particular said information defines a dynamically changing age level. This can be used to force purse owners to return each electronic monetary unit back to the issuing party after a specified cycle measured in time or transactions has passed in order to validate the authenticy, and in particular in order to test for possibly duplicated monetary units.

Aging of electronic payment units

The basic idea comprised of the present invention is to provide two sets of descriptors having each at least three descriptors and each set is used in an alternating manner for defining the location of source and target of the copy operations which are to be performed during the defragmentation procedure. The defragmentation procedure is performed as a sequence of copy operations on copy chunks, i.e., a certain number of sequentially arranged bytes to be copied being part of a valid data block to be copied. In each of said copy operations in said sequence the values which are assigned to said descriptors Change. According to a characterizing feature of the present invention during the whole sequence of copy operations comprised of the defragmentation process one of the two sets of descriptors holds information which is usable for restoring the contents of a copy chunk in case of a power break during a copy operation on said copy chunk. Thus, defragmenting is a safe procedure, and data integrity is assured.

Memory defragmentation in chipcards

Methods, apparatus and computer software and hardware products providing method, apparatus and system solutions for implementing table lookups in a side-channel attack resistant manner. Embodiments are provided for devices and situations where there is limited amount of RAM memory available or restrictions on memory addressing. The solutions solve problems associated with look up tables with large indices, as well as problems associated with looking up large sized tables or a collection of tables of large cumulative size, in limited devices, in an efficient side-channel attack resistant manner. These solutions provide defenses against both first-order side channel attacks as well as higher-order side channel attacks. One aspect of the present invention is the creation of one or more random tables which are used possibly in conjunction with other tables to perform a table lookup. This denies an adversary information about the table lookup from the side channel and thereby imparting side-channel resistance to the table lookup operation. Another aspect of the present invention is the use of a combination of some operations such as Table Split, Table Mask and Table Aggregate, to achieve this side-channel resistance within the limited amounts of available RAM and limited memory addressing capabilities of the device performing table lookups.

Space-efficient, side-channel attack resistant table lookups

A method for changing an operation performed by an electronic device includes defining a process flow chart of the operation to be performed by the electronic device, the process flow chart having one or more primitive actions, the operation having one or more components, the primitive action operating on the components to produce an output. The method further includes determining a number of information dispersal units for each of the components. For each of the components, defining a set of information dispersal units, transforming one or more of the primitive actions of the operation using a transform function to create a transformed primitive action, and applying each of the transformed primitive actions to all the respective sets of information dispersal units to produce a transformed set of transformed information dispersal units.

System and method for protecting against leakage of sensitive information from compromising electromagnetic emanations from computing systems

The invention presented describes a system and procedure for protecting against the espionage of secret information. A counter is allocated to each secret piece of information, in particular codes. The counter counts the number of uses of the secret information. In this, the counter is set to a starting value. Each use of the secret data element increases the counter state by a defined value. If the counter state reaches a maximum value, the use of the secret data element will be blocked. The blocking of the secret information can, however, be avoided if a defined event occurs before the maximum value of the counter is reached which automatically resets the counter state to its starting value. Any technical, economic or organisational condition can be defined as an event. Particular advantages of the invention presented are that each code can have its own counter allocated to it. In this way, different numbers of uses can be established for each code with regard to its function. As a chip card can contain any number of codes for the most widely differing applications, the block is limited solely to the application affected. The use of the chip card is not therefore blocked as a whole. The events can be easily adapted to the widest range of security and user requirements of the respective application area.

System and procedure for protection against the analytical espionage of secret information

The invention relates to data integrity in applications employing smartcards, in particular smartcards in connection with remote stations like personal or desktop card readers or similar inexpensive terminals. Since smartcards today are extensively used particularly in the financial and banking field, the data integrity issue is of particular importance. In such applications, any interrupted data transfer between the smartcard and a terminal can result in making the smartcard unusable and/or corrupt the data, any of which in turn often greatly affects the user. The solution according to the invention is, in brief, to apply an &ldquo;adapted atomicity approach&rdquo; to the smartcard environment, i.e. to adapt and use an atomic approach for smartcard transactions. To implement this, two essential features are incorporated, one being the provision and use of an internal trigger mechanism on the smartcard, the other being the provision and use of a failure-resistant recovery scheme on the smartcard, in particular a record index swapping scheme for data handling on the smartcard during the transaction.

Data integrity in smartcard transactions

A method for decoding F2F signals as well as a device for decoding F2F signals read from a magnetic data carrier is provided. The signal read from the card by a magnetic reading head is amplified by an amplifier with a very high gain, discriminated in a discrimination and integration station to receive a binary looking signal. Out of this digitized signal in a reference time acquisition station a start-up time value is set and a phase is estimated to determine the correct end of a bit cell in a phase estimating station. In a symbol correlation station the received binary signal is correlated with all possible symbol combinations based on the estimated phase to create a correct bit stream. This bit stream might be processed further by a bit recovery station providing a corrected bit stream ready for interpretation.

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Tuebingen, Germany

Helmut Scherzer