From: Natanael <natanael.l@gmail•com>
To: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net>
Cc: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] New side channel attack that can recover Bitcoin keys
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2014 11:00:14 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAAt2M19R_97aXs9rwo8UY5PE7DwHZDT12esPhz76M1EOdGrrdQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CANEZrP1+=JY0RGEMvm9iL09L-tZAWqsSOOwFaroYUKkWumx+xg@mail.gmail.com>
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You've heard of TRESOR?
No, not Trezor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRESOR
Signing on the CPU, without touching RAM.
- Sent from my phone
Den 6 mar 2014 09:41 skrev "Mike Hearn" <mike@plan99•net>:
> I'm wondering about whether (don't laugh) moving signing into the kernel
> and then using the MTRRs to disable caching entirely for a small scratch
> region of memory would also work. You could then disable pre-emption and
> prevent anything on the same core from interrupting or timing the signing
> operation.
>
> However I suspect just making a hardened secp256k1 signer implementation
> in userspace would be of similar difficulty, in which case it would
> naturally be preferable.
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 11:25 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail•com>wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Eric Lombrozo <elombrozo@gmail•com>
>> wrote:
>> > Everything you say is true.
>> >
>> > However, branchless does reduce the attack surface considerably - if
>> nothing else, it significantly ups the difficulty of an attack for a
>> relatively low cost in program complexity, and that might still make it
>> worth doing.
>>
>> Absolutely. I believe these things are worth doing.
>>
>> My comment on it being insufficient was only that "my signer is
>> branchless" doesn't make other defense measures (avoiding reuse,
>> multsig with multiple devices, not sharing hardware, etc.)
>> unimportant.
>>
>> > As for uniform memory access, if we avoided any kind of heap
>> allocation, wouldn't we avoid such issues?
>>
>> No. At a minimum to hide a memory timing side-channel you must perform
>> no data dependent loads (e.g. no operation where an offset into memory
>> is calculated). A strategy for this is to always load the same values,
>> but then mask out the ones you didn't intend to read... even that I'd
>> worry about on sufficiently advanced hardware, since I would very much
>> not be surprised if the processor was able to determine that the load
>> had no effect and eliminate it! :) )
>>
>> Maybe in practice if your data dependencies end up only picking around
>> in the same cache-line it doesn't actually matter... but it's hard to
>> be sure, and unclear when a future optimization in the rest of the
>> system might leave it exposed again.
>>
>> (In particular, you can't generally write timing sign-channel immune
>> code in C (or other high level language) because the compiler is
>> freely permitted to optimize things in a way that break the property.
>> ... It may be _unlikely_ for it to do this, but its permitted— and
>> will actually do so in some cases—, so you cannot be completely sure
>> unless you check and freeze the toolchain)
>>
>> > Anyhow, without having gone into the full details of this particular
>> attack, it seems the main attack point is differences in how squaring and
>> multiplication (in the case of field exponentiation) or doubling and point
>> addition (in the case of ECDSA) are performed. I believe using a branchless
>> implementation where each phase of the operation executes the exact same
>> code and accesses the exact same stack frames would not be vulnerable to
>> FLUSH+RELOAD.
>>
>> I wouldn't be surprised.
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Subversion Kills Productivity. Get off Subversion & Make the Move to
>> Perforce.
>> With Perforce, you get hassle-free workflows. Merge that actually works.
>> Faster operations. Version large binaries. Built-in WAN optimization and
>> the
>> freedom to use Git, Perforce or both. Make the move to Perforce.
>>
>> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=122218951&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bitcoin-development mailing list
>> Bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net
>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
>>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Subversion Kills Productivity. Get off Subversion & Make the Move to
> Perforce.
> With Perforce, you get hassle-free workflows. Merge that actually works.
> Faster operations. Version large binaries. Built-in WAN optimization and
> the
> freedom to use Git, Perforce or both. Make the move to Perforce.
>
> http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=122218951&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk
> _______________________________________________
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> Bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net
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>
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-03-06 10:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 24+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-03-05 12:49 Mike Hearn
2014-03-05 12:56 ` Pieter Wuille
2014-03-05 13:18 ` Jean-Paul Kogelman
2014-03-05 14:04 ` Pieter Wuille
2014-03-05 16:21 ` Kevin
2014-03-05 19:39 ` Peter Todd
2014-03-05 19:51 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-03-05 20:32 ` Peter Todd
2014-03-05 20:54 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-03-12 9:44 ` Peter Todd
2014-03-05 22:17 ` James Hartig
2014-03-05 22:26 ` Eric Lombrozo
2014-03-06 7:02 ` Odinn Cyberguerrilla
2014-03-08 19:34 ` Luke-Jr
2014-03-09 1:57 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-03-05 21:31 ` Eric Lombrozo
2014-03-05 21:44 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-03-05 22:14 ` Eric Lombrozo
2014-03-05 22:25 ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-03-06 8:38 ` Mike Hearn
2014-03-06 10:00 ` Natanael [this message]
2014-03-25 13:39 ` Troy Benjegerdes
2014-03-25 13:50 ` Gavin Andresen
2014-03-08 19:29 ` Gustav Simonsson
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