Problems with private keyring?

Florian Weimer fw@deneb.enyo.de
Thu Mar 22 20:34:21 2001


Florian Weimer <Florian.Weimer@RUS.Uni-Stuttgart.DE> writes:


> If you're paranoid, you can apply the following patch (for RSA keys,
> DSA keys have to wait until tomorrow). It should fix the problem (if
> a problem exists at all).
Additional information has become available: http://www.i.cz/pdf/pgp/OpenPGP_attack_CZ.pdf Even in English: http://www.i.cz/en/pdf/openPGP_attack_ENGvktr.pdf The first attack is targeted at the unprotected public key contained in the secret key packet. The public key is changed by the attacker, and when the victim computes a (broken) signature using the broken public and secret (protected by the passphrase) key combination, the attacker can recover the secret portion of the signature. A very interesting attack, which is primarly targeted at DSA keys (GnuPG is vulnerable to this with DSA keys, but not with RSA keys). The paper describes two additional attacks against RSA keys which affect GnuPG as well. I missed these attacks browsing the Czech version of the paper, and my previous claims that an unpatched GnuPG version was not vulnerable is *false*. Sorry about that. The additional checks introduced by my patch are very similar to the checks Klima and Rosa propose. A slightly updated and signed version is available at: http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/files/fw/gnupg-klima-rosa.diff http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/files/fw/gnupg-klima-rosa.diff.asc Unfortunately, the situation with DSA signatures is much, much worse. IMHO, the protected data is probably not sufficient to validate the unprotected data, so the way the secret key is stored has to be changed completely. This is going to introduce incompatibilities, and I don't think I'm in a position to do this, so no further patches from me, sorry. :-/