Abstract :
Smart cards have become a common thing
today. Smart cards with various utilities are used today since
they are easy to carry and relatively secured. But due to
advancement of technologies, smart cards are becoming
increasingly insecure. A paper from certain conference
suggested a new encryption algorithm to keep the information
secured in smart cards and to overcome forgery attacks. It
claims that, on an average, even a supercomputer will take
101084 years to decrypt, which is much higher than the previous
proposals. It makes use of the length of the PIN, and the
position and the Unicode value of every character in the PIN
along with a secret key to create cipher text. Also, final cipher
text is formed by combining two different cipher texts, one
from date and time and another from PIN and secret key. And
only this final cipher text is saved on the smart card making
this algorithm further more secured. But few anomalies were
noticed in it. Firstly, the cipher text generated using proposed
formula for encryption makes securing it using position
problematic. Secondly, the formula given in actual paper
misses an important step, without which decryption process
gives wrong output. With proposed changes these problems
are eradicated and the algorithm becomes more difficult to
hack
