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.
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
Because studying Cryptography is also about using LaTeX, it's nice to spend a bit of time understanding how to make pretty documents. Because, you know, it's nicer to read.
Here's an awesome quick introduction of Tikz that allows to make beautiful diagram with great precision in a short time:
And I'm bookmarking one more that seems go way further.
I've used Cmder for a while on Windows. Which is a pretty terminal that brings a lot of tools and shortcuts from the linux world. I also have Chocolatey as packet manager. And all in all it works pretty great except Cmder is pretty slow.
I've ran into Babun yesterday, that seems to be kind of the same thing, but with zsh, oh-my-zsh and another packet manager: pact. The first thing I did was downloading tmux and learning how to use it. It works pretty well and I think I have found a replacement for Cmder =)
