Lucky Microseconds:A Timing Attack on Amazon’s s2n Implementation of TLS

s2n is an implementation of the TLS protocol that was released in late June 2015 by Amazon. It is implemented in around 6,000 lines of C99 code. By comparison, OpenSSL needs around 70,000 lines of code to implement the protocol. At the time of its release, Amazon announced that s2n had undergone three external security evaluations and penetration tests. We show that, despite this, s2n - as initially released - was vulnerable to a timing attack in the case of CBC-mode ciphersuites, which could be extended to complete plaintext recovery in some settings. Our attack has two components. The first part is a novel variant of the Lucky 13 attack that works even though protections against Lucky 13 were implemented in s2n. The second part deals with the randomised delays that were put in place in s2n as an additional countermeasure to Lucky 13. Our work highlights the challenges of protecting implementations against sophisticated timing attacks. It also illustrates that standard code audits are insufficient to uncover all cryptographic attack vectors

On Symmetric Encryption with Distinguishable Decryption Failures

We propose to relax the assumption that decryption failures are indistinguishable in security models for symmetric encryption. Our main purpose is to build models that better reflect the reality of cryptographic implementations, and to surface the security issues that arise from doing so. We systematically explore the consequences of this relaxation, with some surprising consequences for our understanding of this basic cryptographic primitive. Our results should be useful to practitioners who wish to build accurate models of their implementations and then analyse them. They should also be of value to more theoretical cryptographers proposing new encryption schemes, who, in an ideal world, would be compelled by this work to consider the possibility that their schemes might leak more than simple decryption failures

Error Oracle Attacks on CBC Mode: Is There a Future for CBC Mode Encryption?

This paper is primarily concerned with the CBC block cipher mode. The impact on the usability of this mode of recently proposed padding oracle attacks, together with other related attacks described in this paper, is considered. For applications where unauthenticated encryption is required, the use of CBC mode is compared with its major symmetric rival, namely the stream cipher. It is argued that, where possible, authenticated encryption should be used, and, where this is not possible, a stream cipher would appear to be a superior choice. This raises a major question mark over the future use of CBC mode, except as part of a more complex mode designed to provide authenticated encryption

Verifying Constant-Time Implementations by Abstract Interpretation

International audienceConstant-time programming is an established discipline to secure programs against timing attacks. Several real-world secure C libraries such as NaCl, mbedTLS, or Open Quantum Safe, follow this discipline. We propose an advanced static analysis, based on state-of-the-art techniques from abstract interpretation, to report time leakage during programming. To that purpose, we analyze source C programs and use full context-sensitive and arithmetic-aware alias analyses to track the tainted flows.We give semantic evidences of the correctness of our approach on a core language. We also present a prototype implementation for C programs that is based on the CompCert compiler toolchain and its companion Verasco static analyzer. We present verification results on various real-world constant-time programs and report on a successful verification of a challenging SHA-256 implementation that was out of scope of previous tool-assisted approaches

Plaintext-Dependent Decryption: A Formal Security Treatment of SSH-CTR.”In

Abstract. This paper presents a formal security analysis of SSH in counter mode in a security model that accurately captures the capabilities of real-world attackers, as well as security-relevant features of the SSH specifications and the OpenSSH implementation of SSH. Under reasonable assumptions on the block cipher and MAC algorithms used to construct the SSH Binary Packet Protocol (BPP), we are able to show that the SSH BPP meets a strong and appropriate notion of security: indistinguishability under buffered, stateful chosen-ciphertext attacks. This result helps to bridge the gap between the existing security analysis of the SSH BPP by Bellare et al. and the recently discovered attacks against the SSH BPP by Albrecht et al. which partially invalidate that analysis

On Hiding a Plaintext Length by Preencryption ⋆

Abstract. It is a well known fact that encryption schemes cannot hide a plaintext length when it is unbounded. We thus admit that an approximation of it may leak and we focus on hiding its precise value. Some standards such as TLS or SSH offer to do it by applying some pad-then-encrypt techniques. In this study, we investigate the information leakage when these techniques are used. We define the notion of padding scheme and its associated security. We show that when a padding length is uniformly distributed, the scheme is nearly optimal. We also show that the insecurity degrades linearly with the padding length.