Bug 1981514 - mbedtls: Local side channel attack on static Diffie-Hellman with Montgomery curves
Summary: mbedtls: Local side channel attack on static Diffie-Hellman with Montgomery c...
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
high
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Red Hat Product Security
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On: 1981515 1981516
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2021-07-12 17:49 UTC by Pedro Sampaio
Modified: 2021-10-28 05:11 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2021-07-12 22:40:28 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Pedro Sampaio 2021-07-12 17:49:22 UTC
The Montgomery curves Curve25519 and Curve448, also known as x25519 and x448 when used for Diffie-Hellman, were designed to minimize the number of checks an implementation needs to do for secure use.

In particular, validity of the peer's public key needs not be checked, as long as the underlying multi-precision (bignum) arithmetic is constant-time. This is not the case in Mbed TLS, but validity checks were still skipped, so an attacker could exploit special inputs (low-order points) in order to cause variations in timing and memory access patterns that would in turn leak information about the private key.

References:

https://tls.mbed.org/tech-updates/security-advisories/mbedtls-security-advisory-2021-07-2

Comment 1 Pedro Sampaio 2021-07-12 17:49:49 UTC
Created mbedtls tracking bugs for this issue:

Affects: epel-all [bug 1981516]
Affects: fedora-all [bug 1981515]

Comment 2 Product Security DevOps Team 2021-07-12 22:40:28 UTC
This CVE Bugzilla entry is for community support informational purposes only as it does not affect a package in a commercially supported Red Hat product. Refer to the dependent bugs for status of those individual community products.


Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.