Practical invalid curve attacks on TLS-ECDH

Abstract

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is based on cyclic groups, where group elements are represented as points in a finite plane. All ECC cryptosystems implicitly assume that only valid group elements will be processed by the different cryptographic algorithms. It is wellknown that a check for group membership of given points in the plane should be performed before processing. However, in several widely used cryptographic libraries we analyzed, this check was missing, in particular in the popular ECC implementations of Oracle and Bouncy Castle. We analyze the effect of this missing check on Oracle’s default Java TLS implementation (JSSE with a SunEC provider) and TLS servers using the Bouncy Castle library. It turns out that the effect on the security of TLS-ECDH is devastating. We describe an attack that allows to extract the long-term private key from a TLS server that uses such a vulnerable library. This allows an attacker to impersonate the legitimate server to any communication partner, after performing the attack only once.