Util::Lookup: Exploiting key decoding in cryptographic libraries
This exposes a critical vulnerability in certified cryptographic libraries, impacting security-sensitive applications by enabling efficient key recovery attacks.
The paper identified that utility functions like base64 decoding in cryptographic libraries leak confidential information, even in trusted environments, and demonstrated an attack that recovers RSA private keys with a single trace using cache side-channels.
Implementations of cryptographic libraries have been scrutinized for secret-dependent execution behavior exploitable by microarchitectural side-channel attacks. To prevent unintended leakages, most libraries moved to constant-time implementations of cryptographic primitives. There have also been efforts to certify libraries for use in sensitive areas, like Microsoft CNG and Botan, with specific attention to leakage behavior. In this work, we show that a common oversight in these libraries is the existence of \emph{utility functions}, which handle and thus possibly leak confidential information. We analyze the exploitability of base64 decoding functions across several widely used cryptographic libraries. Base64 decoding is used when loading keys stored in PEM format. We show that these functions by themselves leak sufficient information even if libraries are executed in trusted execution environments. In fact, we show that recent countermeasures to transient execution attacks such as LVI \emph{ease} the exploitability of the observed faint leakages, allowing us to robustly infer sufficient information about RSA private keys \emph{with a single trace}. We present a complete attack, including a broad library analysis, a high-resolution last level cache attack on SGX enclaves, and a fully parallelized implementation of the extend-and-prune approach that allows a complete key recovery at medium costs.