CRYPTO 2012

Aug 19 – 23
Santa Barbara
California
USA

 

 

 

Efficient Padding Oracle Attacks on Cryptographic Hardware

 

Romain Bardou (INRIA, France)

Riccardo Focardi (Università Ca' Foscari, Italy)

Yusuke Kawamoto (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom)

Lorenzo Simionato (Università Ca' Foscari, Venezia, Italy)

Graham Steel (INRIA, France)

Joe-Kai Tsay (NTNU, Norway)

 

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.

 

 

 

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