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                Date: 1998-07-16
                 
                 
                RSA/crack: Crypto/head Bruce Schneier analysiert
                
                 
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      & stellt in den letzten Zeilen fest, dass dieser neue 
Ansatz, 
RSA/Schlüssel  zu knacken, die jahrelang gängige 
Lehr/meinung auf den Kopf gestellt habe. Numehr gelte: Hast 
du ein Stück von RSA geknackt, gehört dir der ganze Code. 
Conclusio:"Nice attack" 
 
Post/scrypt an die p.t. Print/journalist/inn/en auf der 
Liste: 
1. RSA ist US Marktführer 
2. Schon mal geguckt, welche Bank in .at oder .de welche 
Schlüssel 
nützt? 
 
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Breaking RSA in PKCS1 
July 15, 1998 
 
Reports of RSA's death have been greatly exaggerated.  There 
is a new attack on RSA implementations that can, in some 
circumstances, can be pretty devastating.  Fortunately, the 
attack does not apply to RSA in general. Unfortunately, the 
"circumstances" aren't all that uncommon. 
 
The attack is simple to explain.  I am the attacker, and I 
want to know the plaintext for a particular ciphertext 
encrypted with RSA.  (Generally, this is a session key used 
for something else.) I send my victim a bunch of related 
messages (about one million of them) and watch his 
reaction.  By learning which of those messages conform to 
particular data formats (PKCS1 in the paper), I can do some 
straightforward mathematical analysis and break the message 
I started with. 
 
Point 1: the attacker does not recover the secret key, only 
the plaintext to a particular message.  That means that 
after I send the victim one million messages and watch the 
reactions to each, I only get to read one secret message.  
If I want to read another secret message, it takes another 
million related messages. 
 
Point 2: the attacker is relying on some information from 
the victim.  In this case, he needs to know if the related 
messages he sends decrypt in a certain way.  I like to call 
this general class of attack a "reaction attack," since it 
uses the victim's reaction as input.  This is an old and 
powerful idea, but unfortunately in the age of computers it 
is easy to implement.  Computer systems are good at 
automatically reacting to things, and then broadcasting 
those reactions to the world.  Error messages, status 
messages, health information: it's all there if an attacker 
wants it. 
 
Point 3: the attacker has to send the victim a whole lot of 
related messages to break one message.  The general attack 
requires one billion messages.  This number can be reduced 
somewhat--the experiments against SSL required anywhere from 
300,000 to 2 million related messages--but that's still a 
lot of messages.  Still, computers are good at dealing with 
a lot of messages, and automated systems are likely to 
process those kind of message quantities without even 
noticing.  Smart cards that the attacker can put in his own 
test setup are also vulnerable. 
... 
There were several fixes announced.  (Obvious fix: don't 
tell the attacker if the message was valid or not.) The 
quick ones increase the number of related messages required 
to break one message.  These fixes make it much harder to 
mount this attack against on-line systems--the message 
volume will clog the system--and moderately harder against 
off-line systems like smart cards.  Better fixes are to 
change the PKCS1 protocol, which specifies how the bits of 
plaintext are packed into a data structure that RSA can then 
encrypt.  The RSA message packaging scheme in SET, for 
example, is not vulnerable to this attack. 
 
The attack has ramifications outside PKCS1.  Many protocols 
will have to be corrected and many systems will have to be 
changed.  Many people will have no idea that this attack 
exists and will design insecure implementations of RSA. 
 
Many years ago there was a string of theoretical 
cryptographic results that proved that every bit of RSA is 
as secure as the whole message.  All of us cryptographers 
read the papers and decided that the results weren't 
terribly useful: if the entire RSA-encrypted message is 
secure, then each individual bit is secure.  This piece of 
work turns that result on its head: if you can break single 
bit of an RSA message, then you can break the whole message. 
 
Nice attack. 
 
Relayed by 
schneier@counterpane.com 
http://www.counterpane.com
                   
 
related story 
http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/13281.html  
 
 
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TIP 
Download free PGP 5.5.3i (Win95/NT & Mac) 
http://keyserver.ad.or.at/pgp/download/
                   
 
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edited by Harkank 
published on: 1998-07-16 
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