On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 9:17 AM, Martin Paljak <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 1:56 AM, Michael Nelson <[email protected]> wrote:
>> It also does not matter whether you are using pkcs11 APIs, and whether you 
>> are doing key wrap/unwrap, and whether the data is a key.  Any secret piece 
>> of data encrypted under an RSA cert can be potentially extracted, via any 
>> kind of crypto module, as long as the module will use the deprecated padding 
>> mechanism.
>
> That's a very broad claim. I guess nobody has questioned the fact that
> the authors of the paper optimized a long-known weakness to become
> useful, *if the conditions are right*.
> Like uncontrolled access to C_UnwrapKey or C_Decrypt (in terms of
> PKCS#11, as this is what the authors are using).
>
> It all works, if the module functions as an oracle that can be
> exploited by the adversary. I don't know the SecureID token, but I do
> know some other tokens described in the paper. Any reasonable token
> would do owner PIN verification before trying to decrypt.

Access controls are a mitigation.  There is no guarantee that the
attacker doesn't have access.  Note that if the attacker does have
access they still have incentive to extract the actual keys: so they
can continue to use them even if they lose access, and so they can
avoid auditing facilities on the HSM/token.  Mitigations do not
detract from the cryptanalytic result.  It's time to stop using weak
padding signature algs.

Nico
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