RUSTSEC-2023-0071: Marvin Attack: potential key recovery through timing sidechannels

[github-actions[bot]]

Marvin Attack: potential key recovery through timing sidechannels

Details
Package	rsa
Version	0.9.5
URL	https://github.com/RustCrypto/RSA/issues/19#issuecomment-1822995643
Date	2023-11-22

Impact

Due to a non-constant-time implementation, information about the private key is leaked through timing information which is observable over the network. An attacker may be able to use that information to recover the key.

Patches

No patch is yet available, however work is underway to migrate to a fully constant-time implementation.

Workarounds

The only currently available workaround is to avoid using the rsa crate in settings where attackers are able to observe timing information, e.g. local use on a non-compromised computer is fine.

References

This vulnerability was discovered as part of the "Marvin Attack", which revealed several implementations of RSA including OpenSSL had not properly mitigated timing sidechannel attacks.

See advisory page for additional details.

[matheus23]

For anyone coming across this: the rsa crate is a development dependency for rs-wnfs, so we're only using it for tests, but we've also written up one example on how you would integrate rsa with rs-wnfs. Instead, users should integrate with another RSA library like OpenSSL. In the future we will specify a new version of the share specification that supports Curve25519 instead.