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Definition
Tamper evidence refers to design and production techniques that aim to ensure that the act of tampering will result in an irreversible physical change to the device observable by subsequent audit.
Background
Has an adversary tampered with a computing device?
Although marketing departments may like to tout the concept of a “tamper-proof” device, the engineers responsible for producing such devices tend to regard “tamper-proof” as merely an aspiration, and will instead more modestly discuss a set of enabling techniques. Usually, these techniques are broken into four categories: tamper resistance, tamper detection, tamper response, and tamper evidence.
Theory and Application
A basic (and often easily defeatable) example of tamper evidence are security seals, which (in theory) must be broken for physical entry to occur. Weingart [1] provides a good introductory discussion.
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Weingart S (2000) Physical security devices for computer subsystems: a survey of attacks and defenses. Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems – CHES 2000
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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Smith, S.W. (2011). Tamper Evidence. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_713
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_713
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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