Category Archives: sidechannel

Side Channel cryptanalysis

Time is on my Side – Exploiting Timing Side Channel Vulnerabilities on the Web

Sebastian Schinzel gave an interesting talk today at 28C3, about timing side channel attacks against web applications. (Timing-) Side channel attacks are known in the cryptography world for a long time, and many algorithms like RSA or AES have been successfully attacked. In a nutshell, an attacker measures the time a device needs to process a request (usually an encryption or decryption), and can draw conclusions from that to the values of secret input parameters (a plaintext or a secret key).

(cc)Sebastian showed, that this can be used against none cryptography web applications as well. Instead of just presenting his attacks, he presented general methods how to do timing measurements against web applications first. For example, a web application could perform the following sequence of checks during a user login:

  1. Does the account exist?
  2. Is the account of the user locked?
  3. Has the account expired?
  4. Is the password correct?

If one of these checks fails, the procedure is aborted and an error page is send to the user. Of course, each of these steps requires some time, and from the time it takes from the request to the generation of the error message, one might guess, which of these steps went wrong.

The second attack presented in this talk was a timing attack on an implementation of the XML encryption standard using a PKCS#1.5 padding. Here, the server needs a longer time to process a request, depending on the padding inside the encrypted payload.

For me, my personal highlight was the extension of timing based side channel attacks to none cartographic web applications. I assume, if one would check some famous web applications, many of such timing leaks could be found, because web developers usually don’t care about timing side channels. The timing difference could also be used to assist blind SQL injection attacks, where the timing difference could be the only channel back to the attacker.

Unfortunately, the slides are not (yet) available, but a previous paper describing the methods can be found at http://sebastian-schinzel.de/_download/cosade-2011-extended-abstract.pdf.

OpenSCA

Being at the ECRYPT VAMPIRE research retreat in Bristol at the moment, I have just become aware of become aware of OpenSCA, a toolbox by Elisabeth Oswald for experimenting with side-channel attacks. Unfortunately, although being open-source, it is built upon the commercial (and expensive, I might add) Matlab instead of an open-source mathematics package like SAGE. The reason for that seems to be that MATLAB offers toolboxes like the Instrument Control Toolbox that allow for easy communication and data exchange with measurement instruments. I wonder whether there are any Python packages that would allow you to do the same from within SAGE…

Accepted papers for EUROCRYPT 2009, FSE 2009 and CT-RSA 2009

The lists of accepted papers for the following conferences have become available in the last couple of days:

Interesting cryptanalysis papers will be presented at all of the above conferences. It is a bit of a hassle to have CT-RSA and EUROCRYPT back to back on two different continents though.