Paper 2012/417

Efficient Padding Oracle Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware

Romain Bardou, Riccardo Focardi, Yusuke Kawamoto, Lorenzo Simionato, Graham Steel, and Joe-Kai Tsay

Abstract

We show how to exploit the encrypted key import functions of a variety of different cryptographic devices to reveal the imported key. The attacks are padding oracle attacks, where error messages resulting from incorrectly padded plaintexts are used as a side channel. In the asymmetric encryption case, we modify and improve Bleichenbacher's attack on RSA PKCS#1v1.5 padding, giving new cryptanalysis that allows us to carry out the `million message attack' in a mean of 49 000 and median of 14 500 oracle calls in the case of cracking an unknown valid ciphertext under a 1024 bit key (the original algorithm takes a mean of 215 000 and a median of 163 000 in the same case). We show how implementation details of certain devices admit an attack that requires only 9 400 operations on average (3 800 median). For the symmetric case, we adapt Vaudenay's CBC attack, which is already highly efficient. We demonstrate the vulnerabilities on a number of commercially available cryptographic devices, including security tokens, smartcards and the Estonian electronic ID card. The attacks are efficient enough to be practical: we give timing details for all the devices found to be vulnerable, showing how our optimisations make a qualitative difference to the practicality of the attack. We give mathematical analysis of the effectiveness of the attacks, extensive empirical results, and a discussion of countermeasures and manufacturer reaction.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Implementation
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Full version of a paper published at CRYPTO 2012
Keywords
RSAcryptanalysisimplementationpadding oracle
Contact author(s)
graham steel @ inria fr
History
2012-08-01: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2012/417
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2012/417,
      author = {Romain Bardou and Riccardo Focardi and Yusuke Kawamoto and Lorenzo Simionato and Graham Steel and Joe-Kai Tsay},
      title = {Efficient Padding Oracle Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2012/417},
      year = {2012},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/417}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/417}
}
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