Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity and the author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a crypto architect at O(1) Labs (working on the Mina cryptocurrency), before that I was the security lead for Diem (formerly Libra) at Novi (Facebook), and a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting.
Like the audit of OpenSSL wasn't awesome enough, today we learned that we were going to audit Let's Encrypt this summer as well. Pretty exciting agenda for an internship!
ISRG has engaged the NCC Group Crypto Services team to perform a security review of Let’s Encrypt’s certificate authority software, boulder, and the ACME protocol. NCC Group’s team was selected due to their strong reputation for cryptography expertise, which brought together Matasano Security, iSEC Partners, and Intrepidus Group.
I was really confused about all those acronyms when I started digging into OpenSSL and RFCs. So here's a no bullshit quick intro to them.
PKCS#7
Or Public-Key Crypto Standard number 7. It's just a guideline, set of rules, on how to send messages, sign messages, etc... There are a bunch of PKCS that tells you exactly how to do stuff using crypto. PKCS#7 is the one who tells you how to sign and encrypt messages using certificates.
If you ever see "pkcs#7 padding", it just refers to the padding explained in pkcs#7.
X509
In a lot of things in the world (I'm being very vague), we use certificates. For example each person can have a certificate, and each person's certificate can be signed by the government certificate. So if you want to verify that this person is really the person he pretends to be, you can check his certificate and check if the government signature on his certificate is valid.
TLS use x509 certificates to authenticate servers. If you go on https://www.facebook.com, you will first check their certificate, see who signed it, checked the signer's certificate, and on and on until you end up with a certificate you can trust. And then! And only then, you will encrypt your session.
So x509 certificates are just objects with the name of the server, the name of who signed his certificate, the signature, etc...
Certificate
Version
Serial Number
Algorithm ID
Issuer
Validity
Not Before
Not After
Subject
Subject Public Key Info
Public Key Algorithm
Subject Public Key
Issuer Unique Identifier (optional)
Subject Unique Identifier (optional)
Extensions (optional)
...
Certificate Signature Algorithm
Certificate Signature
ASN.1
So, how should we write our certificate in a computer format? There are a billion ways of formating a document and if we don't agree on one then we will never be able to ask a computer to parse a x509 certificate.
That's what ASN.1 is for, it tells you exactly how you should write your object/certificate
DER
ASN.1 defines the abstract syntax of information but does not restrict the way the information is encoded. Various ASN.1 encoding rules provide the transfer syntax (a concrete representation) of the data values whose abstract syntax is described in ASN.1.
Now to encode our ASN.1 object we can use a bunch of different encodings specified in ASN.1, the most common one being used in TLS is DER
DER is a TLV kind of encoding, meaning you first write the Tag (for example, "serial number"), and then the Length of the following value, and then the Value (in our example, the serial number).
DER is also more than that:
DER is intended for situations when a unique encoding is needed, such as in cryptography, and ensures that a data structure that needs to be digitally signed produces a unique serialized representation.
So there is only one way to write a DER document, you can't re-order the elements.
And if you see any equal sign =, it's for padding.
So if the first 6 bits of your file is '01' in base 10, then you will write that as B in plaintext. See an example if you still have no idea about what I'm talking about.
PEM
A pem file is just two comments (that are very important) and the data in base64 in the middle. For example the pem file of an encrypted private key:
This is my second video, after the first explaining how DPA works. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that but I think it is already better than the first one. Here I explain how Coppersmith used LLL, an algorithm to reduce lattices basis, to attack RSA. I also explain how his attack was simplified by Howgrave-Graham, and the following Boneh and Durfee attack simplified by Herrmann and May as well.
I haven't been posting for a while, and this is because I was busy looking for a place in Chicago. I finally found it! And I just accomplished my first day at Cryptography Services, or rather at Matasano since I'm in their office, or rather at NCC Group since everything must be complicated :D
I arrived and received a bag of swags along with a brand new macbook pro! That's awesome except for the fact that I spent way too much time trying to understand how to properly use it. A few things I've discovered:
you can pipe to pbcopy and use pbpaste to play with the clipboard
open . in the console opens the current directory in Finder (on windows with cygwin I use explorer .)
in the terminal preference: check "use option as meta key" to have all the unix shortcuts in the terminal (alt+b, ctrl+a, etc...)
get homebrew to install all the things
I don't know what I'll be blogging about next, because I can't really disclose the work I'll be doing there. But so far the people have been really nice and welcoming, the projects seem to be amazingly interesting (and yeah, I will be working on OpenSSL!! (the audit is public so that I can say :D)). The city is also amazing and I've been really impressed by the food. Every place, every dish and every bite has been a delight :)
I posted previously about my researches on RSA attacks using lattice's basis reductions techniques, I gave a talk today that went really well and you can check the slides on the github repo
I wanted to record myself so I could have put that on youtube along with the slides but... I completely forgot once I got on stage. But this is OK as I got corrected on some points, it will make the new recording better :) I will try to make it as soon as possible and upload it on youtube.
It's my first survey ever and I had much fun writing it! I don't really know if I can call it a survey, it reads like a vulgarization/explanation of the papers from Coppersmith, Howgrave-Graham, Boneh and Durfee, Herrmann and May. There is a short table of the running times at the end of each sections. There is also the code of the implementations I coded at the end of the survey.
If you spot a typo or something weird, wrong, or badly explained. Please tell me!
I've Implemented a Coppersmith-type attack (using LLL reductions of lattice basis). It was done by Boneh and Durfee and later simplified by Herrmann and May. The program can be found on my github.
The attack allows us to break RSA and the private exponent d.
Here's why RSA works (where e is the public exponent, phi is euler's totient function, N is the public modulus):
\[ ed = 1 \pmod{\varphi(N)} \]
\[ \implies ed = k \cdot \varphi(N) + 1 \text{ over } \mathbb{Z} \]
\[ \implies k \cdot \varphi(N) + 1 = 0 \pmod{e} \]
\[ \implies k \cdot (N + 1 - p - q) + 1 = 0 \pmod{e} \]
\[ \implies 2k \cdot (\frac{N + 1}{2} + \frac{-p -q}{2}) + 1 = 0 \pmod{e} \]
The last equation gives us a bivariate polynomial \( f(x,y) = 1 + x \cdot (A + y) \). Finding the roots of this polynomial will allow us to easily compute the private exponent d.
The attack works if the private exponent d is too small compared to the modulus: \( d < N^{0.292} \).
To use it:
look at the tests in boneh_durfee.sage and make your own with your own values for the public exponent e and the public modulus N.
guess how small the private exponent d is and modify delta so you have d < N^delta
tweak m and t until you find something. You can use Herrmann and May optimized t = tau * m with tau = 1-2*delta. Keep in mind that the bigger they are, the better it is, but the longer it will take. Also we must have 1 <= t <= m.
you can also decrease X as it might be too high compared to the root of x you are trying to find. This is a last recourse tweak though.
Here is the tweakable part in the code:
# Tweak values here !
delta = 0.26 # so that d < N^delta
m = 3 # x-shifts
t = 1 # y-shifts # we must have 1 <= t <= m
