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Mitigate a flush+reload cache attack on RSA secret exponents.
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Description

Mitigate a flush+reload cache attack on RSA secret exponents.

* mpi/mpi-pow.c (mpi_powm): Always perform the mpi_mul for exponents
hold in secure memory.

The attack is described in a paper to be pusblished at eprint.iacr.org:

Flush+Reload: a High Resolution, Low Noise, L3 Cache Side-Channel
Attack by Yuval Yarom and Katrina Falkner. 18 July 2013.

Flush+Reload is a cache side-channel attack that monitors access to
data in shared pages. In this paper we demonstrate how to use the
attack to extract private encryption keys from GnuPG.  The high
resolution and low noise of the Flush+Reload attack enables a spy
program to recover over 98% of the bits of the private key in a
single decryption or signing round. Unlike previous attacks, the
attack targets the last level L3 cache. Consequently, the spy
program and the victim do not need to share the execution core of
the CPU. The attack is not limited to a traditional OS and can be
used in a virtualised environment, where it can attack programs
executing in a different VM.
  • Signed-off-by: Werner Koch <wk@gnupg.org>

Details

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wernerAuthored on Jul 19 2013, 1:49 PM
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rGfd86f3031161: Fix git revision parsing.
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