Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2017/627

In this paper we demonstrate a complete break of RSA-1024 as implemented in Libgcrypt. Our attack makes essential use of the fact that Libgcrypt uses the left-to-right method for computing the sliding-window expansion. We show for the first time that the direction of the encoding matters: the pattern of squarings and multiplications in left-to-right sliding windows leaks significantly more information about exponent bits than for right-to-left. We show how to incorporate this additional information into the Heninger-Shacham algorithm for partial key reconstruction, and use it to obtain very efficient full key recovery for RSA-1024. We also provide strong evidence that the same attack works for RSA-2048 with only moderately more computation.