[Bitcoin-development] New side channel attack that can recover Bitcoin keys

[Kevin]

On 3/5/2014 7:49 AM, Mike Hearn wrote:
> A new practical technique has been published that can recover 
> secp256k1 private keys after observing OpenSSL calculate as little as 
> 200 signatures:
>
> http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/161.pdf
>
> This attack is based on the FLUSH+RELOAD technique published last 
> year. It works by observing L3 CPU cache timings and forcing cache 
> line flushes using the clflush opcode. As a result, it is applicable 
> to any x86 environment where an attacker may be able to run on the 
> same hardware i.e. virtualised hosting environments where keys are 
> being reused.
>
> I am not currently aware of any efforts to make OpenSSL's secp256k1 
> implementation completely side channel free in all aspects. Also, 
> unfortunately many people have reimplemented ECDSA themselves and even 
> if OpenSSL gets fixed, the custom implementations probably won't.
>
> So, IMHO this is a sign for hot wallet users to start walking (but not 
> running) towards the exits of these shared cloud services:  it doesn't 
> feel safe to sign transactions on these platforms, so hot wallets 
> should be managed by dedicated hardware. Of course other parts of the 
> service, like the website, are less sensitive and can still run in the 
> cloud. I doubt the researchers will release their code to do the side 
> channel attack and it's rather complex to reimplement, so this gives 
> some time for mitigation. Unfortunately the huge sums being held in 
> some "bitbank" style hot wallets mean that attackers are well 
> motivated to pull off even quite complex attacks.
>
>
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>
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How can we patch this issue?


-- 
Kevin

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