There’s an extensive rebuttal RSA wrote in response to a paper showing that their SecurID 800 token has a crypto vulnerability. It’s interesting how RSA’s response walks around the research without directly addressing it. A perfectly accurate (but inflammatory) headline could also have been “RSA’s RSA Implementation Contained Security Flaw Known Since 1998“.

The research is great and easy to summarize:

We optimized Bleichenbacher’s PKCS #1 v1.5 attack by about 5-10x

There are a number of different oracles that give varying attacker advantage

Here are a bunch of tokens vulnerable to this improvement of the 1998 attack

Additional interesting points from the paper:

Aladdin eTokenPro is vulnerable to a simple Vaudenay CBC padding attack as well. Even worse!

RSA implemented the worst oracle of the set the authors enumerate, giving the most attacker advantage.

If you use PKCS #1 v2.0, you should be safe against the Bleichenbacher attack. Unless you use RSA’s implementation, which always sets a flag in generated keys that allows selecting v1.5 and performing a slight variant of this attack.

The real conclusion is that none of the manufacturers seemed to take implementation robustness seriously. Even the two implementations that were safe from these attacks were only safe because implementation flaws caused them to not provide useful information back to the attacker.

The first counterclaim RSA makes is that this research does not compromise the private key stored on the token. This is true. However, it allows an attacker to decrypt and recover other “wrapped” keys encrypted by the token’s key pair. This is like saying an attacker is running a process with root access but doesn’t know the root password. She can effectively do all the same things as if she did have the password, at least until the process is killed.

RSA is ignoring the point that even a legitimate user should not be able to recover these encrypted “wrapped” keys. They can only cause the token to unwrap and use them on the operator’s behalf, not recover the keys themselves. So this attack definitely qualifies as privilege escalation, even if performed by the authorized user herself.

The second claim is that this attack requires local access and a PIN. This is also correct, although it depends on some assumptions. PKCS #11 is an API, so RSA really has no firm knowledge how all their customers are using it. Some applications may proxy access to the token via a web frontend or other network access. An application may cache the PIN. As with other arguments that privilege escalation attacks don’t matter, it assumes a lot about the customer and attacker profile that RSA has no way of knowing.

The final claim is that OAEP (PKCS #1 v2.0) is not subject to this vulnerability. This is true. But this doesn’t address the issue raised in the paper where RSA’s implementation sets flags in the key to allow the user to choose v2.0 or v1.5. Hopefully, they’ll be fixing this despite not mentioning it here.

RSA has taken a lot of heat due to the previous disclosure of all the SecurID seeds, so perhaps the press has focused on them unfairly. After all, the research paper shows that many other major vendors had the same problem. My conclusion is that we have a long way to go in getting robust crypto implementations in this token market.