Pierluigi Paganini
October 17, 2017
While security experts are discussing the dreaded KRACK attack against WiFi networks IT giants, including Fujitsu, Google, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft are warning their customers of a severe flaw in widely used RSA cryptographic library produced by German semiconductor manufacturer Infineon Technologies.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-15361, affects the implementation of RSA key pair generation by Infineon’s Trusted Platform Module (TPM).
Infineon TPM is a dedicated microcontroller designed to secure hardware by integrating cryptographic keys into devices and helps to shield against unauthorized access to the data stored by improving the system integrity.
The researchers published the details of the ROCA vulnerability in a blog post and also published a tool online that could be used to test if RSA keys are vulnerable to this dangerous flaw.
According to the experts, the ROCA factorization attack could potentially allow a remote attacker to reverse-calculate a private encryption key just by having a target’s public key.
“A newly discovered vulnerability in generation of RSA keys used by a software library adopted in cryptographic smartcards, security tokens and other secure hardware chips manufactured by Infineon Technologies AG allows for a practical factorization attack, in which the attacker computes the private part of an RSA key. The attack is feasible for commonly used key lengths, including 1024 and 2048 bits, and affects chips manufactured as early as 2012, that are now commonplace.” reads the blog post.
“Only the knowledge of a public key is necessary and no physical access to the vulnerable device is required, The vulnerability does NOT depend on a weak or a faulty random number generator—all RSA keys generated by a vulnerable chip are impacted.”
Exploiting the ROCA vulnerability, an attacker can impersonate key owner, and abuse the private key for different purposes, including decryption of sensitive messages and forgery of signatures.
The ROCA attack works against differed key lengths, including 1024 and 2048 bits, which is widely used for differed applications, including the national identity cards and message protection like PGP.
“The actual impact of the vulnerability depends on the usage scenario, availability of the public keys and the lengths of keys used. We found and analyzed vulnerable keys in various domains including electronic citizen documents, authentication tokens, trusted boot devices, software package signing, TLS/HTTPS keys and PGP.” said the researchers. “The currently confirmed number of vulnerable keys found is about 760,000 but possibly up to two to three magnitudes more are vulnerable. The details will be presented in two weeks at the ACM CCS conference.”
The ROCA vulnerability was reported to Infineon Technologies in February, details about the flaw are included in the research paper titled “The Return of Coppersmith’s Attack: Practical Factorization of Widely Used RSA Moduli” (ROCA).
The experts will present their findings, including the factorization method, on November 2nd at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.
Hurry up, change the affected keys before the experts will publicly reveal the findings of their research.
Major vendors, including Infineon, Microsoft, Google, HP, Lenovo, and Fujitsu have already addressed the ROCA vulnerability with software updates.
Let me close with an important reminder, vulnerable chips are pervasive and are sold also by other vendors that include in their architectures Infineon chips.
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(Security Affairs – BlackOasis APT, FinSpy Spyware)
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Hacking / November 23, 2024
