Paper 2008/510
Reconstructing RSA Private Keys from Random Key Bits
Nadia Heninger and Hovav Shacham
Abstract
We show that an RSA private key with small public exponent can be efficiently recovered given a 0.27 fraction of its bits at random. An important application of this work is to the "cold boot" attacks of Halderman et al. We make new observations about the structure of RSA keys that allow our algorithm to make use of the redundant information in the typical storage format of an RSA private key. Our algorithm itself is elementary and does not make use of the lattice techniques used in other RSA key reconstruction problems. We give an analysis of the running time behavior of our algorithm that matches the threshold phenomenon observed in our experiments.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Public-key cryptography
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Extended abstract in the proceedings of Crypto 2009
- Keywords
- RSAcold bootcryptanalysisbranching process
- Contact author(s)
- hovav @ cs ucsd edu
- History
- 2010-02-26: last of 4 revisions
- 2008-12-02: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2008/510
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2008/510,
author = {Nadia Heninger and Hovav Shacham},
title = {Reconstructing {RSA} Private Keys from Random Key Bits},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2008/510},
year = {2008},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2008/510}
}
