Oracle · France · Bitcoin · Ethereum · Decrypt
A Clever RSA Attack Fooled a Hardware Vault—Here's What It Means for Crypto
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Researchers at UC San Diego and France's Institute for Research in Computer Science impersonated a hardware security module—a tamper-resistant device that stores private keys and signs on request—without ever pulling the key out of it.
Key facts
- RSA is one way of building that proof, created in 1977 by Ron Rivest, Leonard Adleman, and Adi Shamir, the "S" in the name
- In January 2023, Chinese researchers claimed a quantum method that threatened RSA, but had only factored a 48-bit number, and experts dismissed it
- Standard RSA signing applies padding—a scrambling and formatting step, such as PKCS#1 v1.5 or PSS, that runs before the math—and padded signatures don't create the exploitable oracle
- They asked the box to sign roughly 4 billion numbers of their choosing, then did math on the answers
Summary
Researchers at UC San Diego and France's INRIA forged RSA signatures on a 1,024-bit key inside a hardware security module, the kind of device custodians use to guard crypto keys, without extracting the key. Bitcoin and Ethereum sign transactions with elliptic-curve signatures such as ECDSA rather than RSA, and the paper's claims cover RSA only. The attack needed about 2^32 signing requests (roughly 4 billion) and 1,380 CPU core-years, and the authors say it likely poses no immediate threat to most modern RSA deployments, which use padding. But don’t panic, crypto holders.