Return Of Bleichenbacher’s Oracle Threat (ROBOT)

In 1998 Bleichenbacher presented an adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack on the RSA PKCS~#1~v1.5 padding scheme. The attack exploits the availability of a server which responds with different messages based on the ciphertext validity. This server is used as an oracle and allows the attacker to decrypt RSA ciphertexts. Given the importance of this attack, countermeasures were defined in TLS and other cryptographic standards using RSA PKCS~#1~v1.5.

We perform the first large-scale evaluation of Bleichenbacher's RSA vulnerability. We show that this vulnerability is still very prevalent in the Internet and affected almost a third of the top 100 domains in the Alexa Top 1 Million list, including Facebook and Paypal.

We identified vulnerable products from nine different vendors and open source projects, among them F5, Citrix, Radware, Palo Alto Networks, IBM, and Cisco. These implementations provide novel side-channels for constructing Bleichenbacher oracles: TCP resets, TCP timeouts, or duplicated alert messages. In order to prove the importance of this attack, we have demonstrated practical exploitation by signing a message with the private key of \texttt{facebook.com}'s HTTPS certificate. Finally, we discuss countermeasures against Bleichenbacher attacks in TLS and recommend to deprecate the RSA encryption key exchange in TLS and the RSA PKCS~#1~v1.5 standard.