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CacheBleed: a timing attack on OpenSSL constant-time RSA

  • CHES 2016
  • Published:
Journal of Cryptographic Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The scatter–gather technique is a commonly implemented approach to prevent cache-based timing attacks. In this paper, we show that scatter–gather is not constant time. We implement a cache timing attack against the scatter–gather implementation used in the modular exponentiation routine in OpenSSL version 1.0.2f. Our attack exploits cache-bank conflicts on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. We have tested the attack on an Intel Xeon E5-2430 processor. For 4096-bit RSA, our attack can fully recover the private key after observing 16,000 decryptions.

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/openssl/openssl/commit/46a643763de6d8e39ecf6f76fa79b4d04885aa59.

  2. For clarity, the presented histograms show the envelope of the measured data.

  3. Following the disclosure of our attack, OpenSSL released a fix for the problem. See Sect. 7. Version 1.0.2f is, therefore, the latest version vulnerable to the attack described here.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Daniel J. Bernstein for suggesting the name CacheBleed and for helpful comments. This material is based upon work supported by the US National Science Foundation under Grants No. CNS-1408734, CNS-1505799, and CNS-1513671, a gift from Cisco, the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center, the Check Point Institute for Information Security, a Google Faculty Research Award, the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence I-CORE program (center 4/11), the Leona M. & Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, and NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division in the Framework of “Science for Peace.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Data61, CSIRO and University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Yuval Yarom

  2. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Daniel Genkin & Nadia Heninger

  3. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Daniel Genkin

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  1. Yuval Yarom
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Correspondence to Yuval Yarom.

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Yarom, Y., Genkin, D. & Heninger, N. CacheBleed: a timing attack on OpenSSL constant-time RSA. J Cryptogr Eng 7, 99–112 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13389-017-0152-y

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