Non-deterministic Processors
David May, Henk L. Muller, Nigel P. Smart, Non-deterministic Processors. Information Security and Privacy. V. Varadharajan, Y. Mu, (eds.). ISBN 3-540-42300-1, pp. 115–129. July 2001. No electronic version available. External informationAbstract
New techniques have been discovered to find the secret keys stored in smart-cards. These techniques have caused concern for they can allow people to recharge their smartcards (in effect printing money), or illegally use phone or digital TV services. We propose a new processor design which will counteract these techniques. By randomising the instruction stream being executed by the processor we can hide the secret key stored in a smartcard. The extension we propose can be added to existing processors, and is transparent to the algorithm.