Attacking RSA-based sessions in SSL/TLS

Abstract

In this paper we present a practically feasible attack on RSA-based sessions in SSL/TLS protocols. We show that incorporating a version number check over PKCS#1 plaintext used in the SSL/TLS creates a side channel that allows an attacker to invert the RSA encryption. The attacker can then either recover the premaster-secret or sign a message on behalf of the server. Practical tests showed that two thirds of randomly chosen Internet SSL/TLS servers were vulnerable. The attack is an extension of Bleichenbacher's attack on PKCS#1 (v. 1.5). We introduce the concept of a bad-version oracle (BVO) that covers the side channel leakage, and present several methods that speed up the original algorithm. Our attack was successfully tested in practice and the results of complexity measurements are presented in the paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.