David Wong

cryptologie.net

cryptography, security, and random thoughts

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity, research advisor at Archetype, and author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a cryptography architect of Mina at O(1) Labs, the security lead for Libra/Diem at Facebook, and a security engineer at the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. Welcome to my blog about cryptography, security, and other related topics.

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Timing and Lattice Attacks on a Remote ECDSA OpenSSL Server: How Practical Are They Really?

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Alright! My master thesis is done. Here’s a download link

It’s a timing attack on an vulnerable version of OpenSSL. In particular its ECDSA signature with binary curves.

There was an optimization right before the constant-time scalar multiplication of the nonce with the public point. That leads to a timing attack that leaks the length of the ephemeral keys of an Openssl server’s signatures.

In this paper I explain how to setup such an attack, how to use lattices to recover the private key out of just knowing the lengths of the nonces of a bunch of signatures taken during an ephemeral handshake.

If this doesn’t make sense to you just read the paper :D

Also everything is on this github repo. You can reproduce my setup for a vulnerable server and an attacker. Patch and tools are there. If you end up getting better results than the ones in the paper, well tell me!

Also here’s a demo:

EDIT: it’s on the ePrint archive as well now.

← back to all posts blog • 2015-08-31
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Timing and Lattice Attacks on a Remote ECDSA OpenSSL Server: How Practical Are They Really?
08-31 blog
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