# Tag Info

12

Brute forcing the key would hardly be an issue: 128-bit keys (assuming they have been properly generated) are in a space which is way too large to be successfully explored by brute force; and 256-bit keys (the kind you put in AES-256) are even more larger. Whether AES is "faster" than HMAC or not does not make such brute force more feasible: even if each key ...

11

Definitions / Introduction We define (this is solely for our example): $enc()$ and $dec()$ as the encryption and decryption function using CBC mode, with a constant key. any block cipher will do $\oplus$ is the XOR operation $n$ the amount of plain text blocks. the length of a block in bytes is $16$ (i.e. 128 bit) $m_1$ through $m_n$ the plain text blocks ...

6

Clearly, if you had been using AES-256-CBC for confidentiality and AES-256-CBC-MAC for authentication, it would not be secure to use the same key for both confidentiality and authentication. Hence, using the same key for confidentiality and authentication cannot generally be secure; you need additional premises to arrive at that conclusion. In your case it ...

5

Well, when TLS encrypts a stream of traffic, it breaks up the data into records. Each record contains up to 16k of data, and includes its own HMAC. Hence, there is no HMAC over the entire downloaded file; instead, there are a series of HMACs; every single byte of data is covered by one of those HMACs.

4

Their attack does not recover the private key. Instead, it gives the attacker a way to decrypt an arbitrary ciphertext of the attacker's choosing. (This is not the same thing.) If the attacker has a ciphertext $c$, the attacker can query the hardware device tens of thousands of times and then based upon the responses, deduce what the decryption of $c$ is. ...

3

We have a Padding Oracle if there is a different response from the server gives us an indication of the correctness of the pad (say if this needs proving). We can establish this by playing a game where we send badly padded cipher-text and random strings to the server, finally submitting some at random and seeing if we can get a non-negligible Advantage is ...

2

You are basically using gzip to convey the length of the given message. As long as your implementation of AES-CBC is secure (e.g. by using a random IV) then the given scheme should be secure against padding oracle attacks. This is easy to prove as there is nothing that removes the padding from the plaintext. CBC padding in general does not add any security ...

2

The security of these schemes is all comparable, as far as I am aware. In all cases, you need to use authentication (e.g., Encrypt-then-MAC). Padding attacks are just one way that security can fail if you omit the authentication, but all of these schemes will have serious security problems if you omit the authentication. So, don't forget the ...

2

All the details have been published in the paper titled "IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy - Cryptography in the Web: The Case of Cryptographic Design Flaws in ASP.NET" http://netifera.com/research/poet/ieee-aspnetcrypto.pdf

1

If I understand your scenario correctly, padding oracle attacks are probably not a massive concern, but not for the reasons you seem to believe. Padding oracle attacks have nothing to do with maintained open channels, lack of garbage collection, or time the cipher is kept in memory. A padding oracle attack requires two things: a ciphertext whose contents ...

1

Prove? Why does the attacker need to "prove" it? For example, the attacker can check whether there is an oracle by looking at the code and seeing whether such an attack is possible. Or, the attacker can guess that such an attack might be possible and then try the attack. If the attack succeeds, the attacker knows the system is vulnerable. There might ...

1

For a key recovery attack, you'd basically need to break AES itself. There are no known practical key recovery attacks on AES (and if there were, it would not be considered safe to use), so your pretty much only hope would be to find some kind of side-channel attack on the AES implementation, or on the overall crypto framework it is part of. Alternatively, ...

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