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Breaking Ed25519 in WolfSSL

  • Niels Samwel
  • Lejla Batina
  • Guido Bertoni
  • Joan Daemen
  • Ruggero Susella
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 10808)

Abstract

Ed25519 is an instance of the Elliptic Curve based signature scheme EdDSA that was recently introduced to solve an inconvenience of the more established ECDSA. Namely, both schemes require the generation of a value (scalar of the ephemeral key pair) during the signature generation process and the secrecy of this value is critical for security: knowledge of one such a value, or partial knowledge of a series of them, allows reconstructing the signer’s private key. In ECDSA it is not specified how to generate this random value and hence implementations critically rely on the quality of random number generators and are challenging to implement securely. EdDSA removes this dependence by deriving the secret deterministically from the message and a long-term auxiliary key using a cryptographic hash function. The feature of determinism has received wide support as enabling secure implementations and in particular deployment of Ed25519 is spectacular. Today Ed25519 is used in numerous security protocols, networks and both software and hardware security products e.g. OpenSSH, Tor, GnuPG etc.

In this paper we show that in use cases where power or electromagnetic leakage can be exploited, exactly the mechanism that makes EdDSA deterministic complicates its secure implementation. In particular, we break an Ed25519 implementation in WolfSSL, which is a suitable use case for IoT applications. We apply differential power analysis (DPA) on the underlying hash function, SHA-512, requiring only 4 000 traces.

Finally, we present a tweak to the EdDSA protocol that is cheap and effective against the described attack while keeping the claimed advantage of EdDSA over ECDSA in terms of featuring less things that can go wrong e.g. the required high-quality randomness. However, we do argue with our countermeasure that some randomness (that need not be perfect) might be hard to avoid.

Keywords

EdDSA SHA-512 Side-channel attack Real world attack 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by a project funded by DarkMatter LLC.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  • Niels Samwel
    • 1
  • Lejla Batina
    • 1
  • Guido Bertoni
    • 2
  • Joan Daemen
    • 1
    • 3
  • Ruggero Susella
    • 4
  1. 1.Digital Security GroupRadboud UniversityNijmegenThe Netherlands
  2. 2.Security PatternBresciaItaly
  3. 3.STMicroelectronicsDiegemBelgium
  4. 4.STMicroelectronicsAgrate BrianzaItaly

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