A New Vulnerability In RSA Cryptography

romiz writes, "Branch Prediction Analysis is a recent attack vector against RSA public-key cryptography on personal computers that relies on timing measurements to get information on the bits in the private key. However, the method is not very practical because it requires many attempts to obtain meaningful information, and the current OpenSSL implementation now includes protections against those attacks. However, German cryptographer Jean-Pierre Seifert has announced a new method called Simple Branch Prediction Analysis that is at the same time much more efficient that the previous ones, only needs a single attempt, successfully bypasses the OpenSSL protections, and should prove harder to avoid without a very large execution penalty." From the article: "The successful extraction of almost all secret key bits by our SBPA attack against an openSSL RSA implementation proves that the often recommended blinding or so called randomization techniques to protect RSA against side-channel attacks are, in the context of SBPA attacks, totally useless." Le Monde interviewed Seifert (in French, but Babelfish works well) and claims that the details of the SBPA attack are being withheld; however, a PDF of the paper is linked from the ePrint abstract.

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