In all of those cases except P521, the bias introduced by reducing a 512-bit number mod q is negligible. But in the case of P521, where q has 521 bits (i.e. more than 512), reducing a 512-bit number mod q has no effect at all – you get a value of k whose top 9 bits are always zero.

CVE-2024-31497

https://marc.info/?l=oss-security&m=171321011524021&w=2

We show that built-in sensors in commodity PCs, such as microphones, inadvertently capture electromagnetic side-channel leakage from ongoing computation. Moreover, this information is often conveyed by supposedly-benign channels such as audio recordings and common Voice-over-IP applications, even after lossy compression.

Thus, we show, it is possible to conduct physical side-channel attacks on computation by remote and purely passive analysis of commonly-shared channels. These attacks require neither physical proximity (which could be mitigated by distance and shielding), nor the ability to run code on the target or configure its hardware. Consequently, we argue, physical side channels on PCs can no longer be excluded from remote-attack threat models.

We analyze the computation-dependent leakage captured by internal microphones, and empirically demonstrate its efficacy for attacks. In one scenario, an attacker steals the secret ECDSA signing keys of the counterparty in a voice call. In another, the attacker detects what web page their counterparty is loading. In the third scenario, a player in the Counter-Strike online multiplayer game can detect a hidden opponent waiting in ambush, by analyzing how the 3D rendering done by the opponent’s computer induces faint but detectable signals into the opponent’s audio feed.

paper: https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~genkin/papers/lendear.pdf

It’s 3am. Paul, the head of PayPal database administration carefully enters his elaborate passphrase at a keyboard in a darkened cubicle of 1840 Embarcadero Road in East Palo Alto, for the fifth time. He hits Return. The green-on-black console window instantly displays one line of text: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.”

This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.)

Today, should you try to read up the programmer’s manual (AKA the man page) on getpass, you will find it has been long declared obsolete and replaced with a more intelligent alternative in nearly all flavors of modern Unix.

source: Dfly

Go 1.20.2 fixed a small vulnerability in the crypto/elliptic package. The impact was minor, to the point that I don’t think any application was impacted, but the issue was interesting to look at as a near-miss, and to learn from.

source: L

In this post, we’ll talk about permutations, sponge functions, and duplexes–what they are, how they’re built, what makes them secure, and how they’re used. We’ll use a sponge function to build our own hash function, calculate message authentication codes, generate pseudo-random data, and make a stream cipher. We’ll use a duplex to do authenticated encryption, make cryptographic transcripts, create digital signatures, and build an authenticated public key encryption scheme (a.k.a. signcryption). We’ll even design our own authenticated session encryption protocol with only a duplex and an elliptic curve.

The winner, a group of cryptographic algorithms called Ascon, will be published as NIST’s lightweight cryptography standard later in 2023. The chosen algorithms are designed to protect information created and transmitted by the Internet of Things (IoT), including its myriad tiny sensors and actuators. They are also designed for other miniature technologies such as implanted medical devices, stress detectors inside roads and bridges, and keyless entry fobs for vehicles. Devices like these need “lightweight cryptography” — protection that uses the limited amount of electronic resources they possess.

source: HN

I’m pretty happy with the work that’s landing in it. There are both exciting new APIs, and invisible deep backend improvements that are going to make code more maintainable and secure in the long run. All the main work mentioned in the planning post got done, and then some (but not the “stretch goals”).

crypto/ecdh
bigmod replaces math/big
More elliptic curves
TLS and X.509

Hertzbleed is a new family of side-channel attacks: frequency side channels. In the worst case, these attacks can allow an attacker to extract cryptographic keys from remote servers that were previously believed to be secure.

Hertzbleed takes advantage of our experiments showing that, under certain circumstances, the dynamic frequency scaling of modern x86 processors depends on the data being processed. This means that, on modern processors, the same program can run at a different CPU frequency (and therefore take a different wall time) when computing, for example, 2022 + 23823 compared to 2022 + 24436.

source: HN

We show that built-in sensors in commodity PCs, such as microphones, inadvertently capture electromagnetic side-channel leakage from ongoing computation. Moreover, this information is often conveyed by supposedly-benign channels such as audio recordings and common Voice-over-IP applications, even after lossy compression.

We analyze the computation-dependent leakage captured by internal microphones, and empirically demonstrate its efficacy for attacks. In one scenario, an attacker steals the secret ECDSA signing keys of the counterparty in a voice call. In another, the attacker detects what web page their counterparty is loading. In the third scenario, a player in the Counter-Strike online multiplayer game can detect a hidden opponent waiting in ambush, by analyzing how the 3D rendering done by the opponent’s computer induces faint but detectable signals into the opponent’s audio feed.

One side of the equation is r and the other side is multiplied by r and a value derived from s. So it would obviously be a really bad thing if r and s were both 0, because then you’d be checking that 0 = 0 ⨉ [a bunch of stuff], which will be true regardless of the value of [a bunch of stuff]! And that bunch of stuff is the important bits like the message and the public key. This is why the very first check in the ECDSA verification algorithm is to ensure that r and s are both >= 1.

Guess which check Java forgot?

source: HN

The @CryptoHack__ account was pinged today by ENOENT, with a CTF-like challenge found in the wild: Source tweet. Here’s a write-up covering how given a partially redacted PEM, the whole private key can be recovered. The Twitter user, SAXX, shared a partially redacted private RSA key in a tweet about a penetration test where they had recovered a private key. Precisely, a screenshot of a PEM was shared online with 31 of 51 total lines of the file redacted. As ENOENT correctly identified, the redaction they had offered wasn’t sufficient, and from the shared screenshot, it was possible to totally recover the private key.

source: L

KEMTLS, therefore, achieves the same goals as TLS 1.3 (authentication, confidentiality and integrity) in the face of quantum computers. But there’s one small difference compared to the TLS 1.3 handshake. KEMTLS allows the client to send encrypted application data in the second client-to-server TLS message flow when client authentication is not required, and in the third client-to-server TLS message flow when mutual authentication is required. Note that with TLS 1.3, the server is able to send encrypted and authenticated application data in its first response message (although, in most uses of TLS 1.3, this feature is not actually used). With KEMTLS, when client authentication is not required, the client is able to send its first encrypted application data after the same number of handshake round trips as in TLS 1.3.

Intuitively, the handshake signature in TLS 1.3 proves possession of the private key corresponding to the public key certified in the TLS 1.3 server certificate. For these signature schemes, this is the straightforward way to prove possession; another way to prove possession is through key exchanges. By carefully considering the key derivation sequence, a server can decrypt any messages sent by the client only if it holds the private key corresponding to the certified public key. Therefore, implicit authentication is fulfilled. It is worth noting that KEMTLS still relies on signatures by certificate authorities to authenticate the long-term KEM keys.

A lot of my job is implementing specifications, and sometimes in a crypto spec you’ll encounter something like this and what you do is nod, copy it into a comment, break it down into a sequence of operations, and check that the result matches a test case. However, the other day I was having a bit of an identity crisis because I could not remember basic algebra, so I went and re-derived the edwards25519 point decoding formulas as a sort of homework. It turned out to be pretty useful for understanding pieces of the implementation I had been just treating as black boxes. I’m going to try to take you along for the ride, to show that there is no dark magic involved, and that we can all get to the same result as the specification with step-by-step high-school algebra.

Authenticated encryption (AE) is used in a wide variety of applications, potentially in settings for which it was not originally designed. Recent research tries to understand what happens when AE is not used as prescribed by its designers. A question given relatively little attention is whether an AE scheme guarantees “key commitment’’: ciphertext should decrypt to a valid plaintext only under the key that was used to generate the ciphertext. As key commitment is not part of AE’s design goal, AE schemes in general do not satisfy it. Nevertheless, one would not expect this seemingly obscure property to have much impact on the security of actual products. In reality, however, products do rely on key commitment. We discuss three recent applications where missing key commitment is exploitable in practice. We provide proof-of-concept attacks via a tool that constructs AES-GCM ciphertext which can be decrypted to two plaintexts valid under a wide variety of file formats, such as PDF, Windows executables, and DICOM. Finally we discuss two solutions to add key commitment to AE schemes which have not been analyzed in the literature: one is a generic approach that adds an explicit key commitment scheme to the AE scheme, and the other is a simple fix which works for AE schemes like AES-GCM and ChaCha20Poly1305, but requires separate analysis for each scheme.

source: white

We showcase one example of how an attacker can inject a low order subgroup group element in threshold EdDSA protocol secure against malicious adversaries, bypassing existing protections.

source: green

This post is about the situation with Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), a harmless little spam protocol that has somehow become a monster. My request is simple and can be summarized as follows: Dear Google: would you mind rotating and publishing your DKIM secret keys on a periodic basis? This would make the entire Internet quite a bit more secure, by removing a strong incentive for criminals to steal and leak emails. The fix would cost you basically nothing, and would remove a powerful tool from hands of thieves.

source: green

This is a pretty good example of code that probably looks decent to a casual inspection, and seems to call functions with the right names, etc., but it’s pretty bad.

source: L

The paper authors were able to optimize existing attacks exploiting one-bit leakages against 192-bit and 160-bit elliptic curves. They were further able to exploit leakages of less than one bit in the same curves.

We’re used to discrete quantities in computer science, but you can leak less than one bit of information in the case of side-channels.

If “less than one bit” sounds strange, that’s probably our fault for always rounding up to the nearest bit when we express costs in computer science.

source: green

The age design includes a double invocation of X25519: once with a domain separation tweak, once with the actual secret. While implementing this I wondered: can we multiply those two scalars first, instead of doing two point multiplications in a row? It would be much faster!

Follow up: https://buttondown.email/cryptography-dispatches/archive/cryptography-dispatches-replace-pgp-with-an-https/

What is this, sporting dozens of colorful knobs, almost like a “turn-the-knob” toddler’s game at a playground in a nearest mall? This the awesome British Bombe electro-mechanical codebreaking machine which only had one purpose: to determine the rotor settings on the German cipher machine “ENIGMA” during WW2.

Great collection.

source: grugq