Morpheus: Bringing the (PKCS) One to Meet the Oracle

Abstract

This paper focuses on developing an automatic, black-box testing approach called Morpheus to check the non-compliance of libraries implementing PKCS#1-v1.5 signature verification with the PKCS#1-v1.5 standard. Non-compliance can not only make implementations vulnerable to Bleichenbacher-style RSA signature forgery attacks but also can induce interoperability issues. For checking non-compliance, Morpheus adaptively generates interesting test cases and then takes advantage of an oracle, a formally proven correct implementation of PKCS#1-v1.5 signature standard, to detect non-compliance in an implementation under test. We have used Morpheus to test 45 implementations of PKCS#1-v1.5 signature verification and discovered that 6 of them are susceptible to variants of the Bleichenbacher-style low public exponent RSA signature forgery attack, 1 implementation has a buffer overflow, 33 implementations have incompatibility issues, and 8 implementations have minor leniencies. Our findings have been responsibly disclosed and positively acknowledged by the developers.