Schneier - TPM-Fail Attacks Against Cryptographic Coprocessors

Really interesting research: TPM-FAIL: TPM meets Timing and Lattice Attacks, by Daniel Moghimi, Berk Sunar, Thomas Eisenbarth, and Nadia Heninger.

Abstract: Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a hardware-based root of trust that protects cryptographic keys from privileged system and physical adversaries. In this work, we per-form a black-box timing analysis of TPM 2.0 devices deployed on commodity computers. Our analysis reveals that some of these devices feature secret-dependent execution times during signature generation based on elliptic curves. In particular, we discovered timing leakage on an Intel firmware-based TPM as well as a hardware TPM. We show how this information allows an attacker to apply lattice techniques to recover 256-bit private keys for ECDSA and ECSchnorr signatures. On Intel fTPM, our key recovery succeeds after about1,300 observations and in less than two minutes. Similarly, we extract the private ECDSA key from a hardware TPM manufactured by STMicroelectronics, which is certified at CommonCriteria (CC) EAL 4+, after fewer than 40,000 observations. We further highlight the impact of these vulnerabilities by demonstrating a remote attack against a StrongSwan IPsecVPN that uses a TPM to generate the digital signatures for authentication. In this attack, the remote client recovers the server's private authentication key by timing only 45,000 authentication handshakes via a network connection.

The vulnerabilities we have uncovered emphasize the difficulty of correctly implementing known constant-time techniques, and show the importance of evolutionary testing and transparent evaluation of cryptographic implementations.Even certified devices that claim resistance against attacks require additional scrutiny by the community and industry, as we learn more about these attacks.

These are real attacks, and take between 4-20 minutes to extract the key. Intel has a firmware update.

Attack website. News articles. Boing Boing post. Slashdot thread.



from Schneier on Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/11/tpm-fail_attack.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Krebs - NY Charges First American Financial for Massive Data Leak

Image
In May 2019, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the website of mortgage title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. had exposed approximately 885 million records related to mortgage deals going back to 2003. On Wednesday, regulators in New York announced that First American was the target of their first ever cybersecurity enforcement action in connection with the incident, charges that could bring steep financial penalties. First American Financial Corp. Santa Ana, Calif.-based  First American [ NYSE:FAF ] is a leading provider of title insurance and settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industries. It employs some 18,000 people and brought in $6.2 billion in 2019 . As first reported here last year , First American’s website exposed 16 years worth of digitized mortgage title insurance records — including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and drivers license images. The d...
Read more

KnowBe4 - Scam Of The Week: "When Users Add Their Names to a Wall of Shame"

Image
Eric Howes , KnowBe4 Principal Lab Researcher, found out about another insidious bad guy trick: " If you work in IT there has undoubtedly come a dark moment when you wondered to yourself just who among your employee users would be gullible enough to click through a phishing email and potentially bring down your organization. from KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Blog https://blog.knowbe4.com/when-users-add-their-names-to-a-wall-of-shame
Read more