PolarSSL Security Advisory 2013-01

Title

Lucky thirteen - timing side channel during decryption

CVE

CVE-2013-0169

Date

4th of February 2013 ( Updated on 12th of July 2013 )

Affects

all checked SSL libraries including PolarSSL versions prior to
PolarSSL 1.2.6

Not affected

AES-GCM-based or RC4-based ciphersuites. Servers and
clients that only communicate over a private network

Impact

Possible (partial) recovery of plaintext

Exploit

Withheld

Solution

Upgrade to PolarSSL 1.2.6 or PolarSSL 1.1.6

Workaround

Only use AES-GCM-based of RC4-based ciphersuites

Credits

Kenny Paterson and Nadhem Alfardan

The paper Lucky Thirteen: Breaking the TLS and DTLS Record Protocols by Kenny Paterson and Nadhem Alfardan describes a family of attacks that applies to implementations of CBC- mode ciphersuites in TLS 1.1 and 1.2 / DTLS 1.0 and 1.2 (and earlier implementations).

The attack is based on the fact that, when badly formatted padding is encountered during decryption, a MAC check must still be performed on some data to prevent the known timing attacks. The RFCs for TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 recommend checking the MAC as if there was a zero-length pad. Depending on some other factors, the small timing difference introduced here can be used to perform a an attack to reveal (part of) the plaintext.

Impact

When a CBC-based ciphersuite is used and an adversary has the ability to inject packets at will into the connection between the client and the server, the adversary can potentially use statistical analysis to retrieve plaintext from ciphertext messages.

All SSL libraries checked by the authors were revealed to be vulnerable in some way.

This attack works better against DTLS than regular TLS. PolarSSL only uses regular TLS at this point. In addition PolarSSL does not send the alert messages required for the adversary to properly perform this attack. Keep this in mind when assessing the impact for your situation.

Resolution

PolarSSL 1.2.5 and PolarSSL 1.2.6 contain fixes in the SSL decrypt process ( ssl_decrypt_buf() ) that remove the timing differences that can result from malformed padding data. As a result our timing tests show that ssl_decrypt_buf() now returns in a semi-fixed amount of time independent of the padding length preventing an adversary to use these timing differences to attack the secured communication channel.

Workaround

As a workaround it is also possible to disable CBC-based ciphersuites and only allow AES-GCM-based or RC4-based ciphersuites. Due to the nature of these ciphersuites they are not vulnerable to the attacks described in the paper.

Advice

We strongly advise you to upgrade to PolarSSL 1.2.6 if an adversary can gain access to (part of) the network and inject packets between your servers and clients.

Special thanks

We want to thank Kenny and Nadhem for their support during the disclosure phase and the testing of our patch.