Paper 2023/1711

Passive SSH Key Compromise via Lattices

Keegan Ryan, University of California, San Diego
Kaiwen He, University of California, San Diego, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
George Arnold Sullivan, University of California, San Diego
Nadia Heninger, University of California, San Diego
Abstract

We demonstrate that a passive network attacker can opportunistically obtain private RSA host keys from an SSH server that experiences a naturally arising fault during signature computation. In prior work, this was not believed to be possible for the SSH protocol because the signature included information like the shared Diffie-Hellman secret that would not be available to a passive network observer. We show that for the signature parameters commonly in use for SSH, there is an efficient lattice attack to recover the private key in case of a signature fault. We provide a security analysis of the SSH, IKEv1, and IKEv2 protocols in this scenario, and use our attack to discover hundreds of compromised keys in the wild from several independently vulnerable implementations.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Publication info
Published elsewhere. ACM CCS 2023
DOI
10.1145/3576915.3616629
Keywords
RSAcryptanalysislattices
Contact author(s)
kryan @ ucsd edu
khe01 @ mit edu
gsulliva @ ucsd edu
nadiah @ cs ucsd edu
History
2023-11-06: approved
2023-11-05: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2023/1711
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2023/1711,
      author = {Keegan Ryan and Kaiwen He and George Arnold Sullivan and Nadia Heninger},
      title = {Passive SSH Key Compromise via Lattices},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2023/1711},
      year = {2023},
      doi = {10.1145/3576915.3616629},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1711}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1711}
}
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