"ROBOT Crypto Attack on RSA Is Back as Marvin Arrives"

Hubert Kario, a senior quality engineer on the QE BaseOS Security team at Red Hat, has discovered flaws in a 25-year-old method for encrypting data using RSA public-key cryptography. According to Kario, in a paper titled "Everlasting ROBOT: the Marvin Attack," many software implementations of the PKCS#1 v1.5 padding scheme for RSA key exchange, which were previously thought to be immune to Daniel Bleichenbacher's well-known attack, are actually vulnerable. Bleichenbacher, a Swiss cryptographer, demonstrated in 1998 that a client of an SSL/TLS server could use information gleaned from server error responses to learn enough about the padding in order to decrypt the protected message. In 2017, security researchers identified at least eight Information Technology (IT) vendors and open-source projects as being vulnerable to a variant of Bleichenbacher's attack. Their attack was named ROBOT, which stands for Return Of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Threat. Kario names his technique Marvin in homage to "the Paranoid Android," named Marvin from Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," and as a nod to the ROBOT moniker. This article continues to discuss the Marvin attack.

The Register reports "ROBOT Crypto Attack on RSA Is Back as Marvin Arrives"

Submitted by grigby1