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From: Florian Weimer (Florian.WeimerRUS.UNI-STUTTGART.DE)
Date: Thu Mar 22 2001 - 13:24:51 CST

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    Pavel Kankovsky <peakargo.troja.mff.cuni.cz> writes:

    > Yes...for DSA keys, the modification of unencrypted public parameters is
    > sufficient to carry out the attack (and this means the simple defence I
    > proposed would not work). For RSA keys, esp. for version 4 of the format,
    > they have to modify the encrypted information as well, exploiting
    > weaknesses in the encryption to localize the effect of their changes.
    > It is not as trivial as the DSA case but some implementations of RSA
    > signatures (those not checking the keys thoroughly enough) may be
    > vulnerable as well.

    Yes, that's right. Unfortunatly I missed these attacks, and an
    unpatched GnuPG is vulnerable to them. Sorry about the confusion.

    I've written a patch which addresses the problem:

            http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/files/fw/gnupg-klima-rosa.diff
            http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/files/fw/gnupg-klima-rosa.diff.asc

    It introduces additional consistency checks, as suggested by the
    authors of the paper. The checks are slightly different, but they
    make the two additional attacks infeasible, I think. In the future,
    it might be a good idea to add a check the generated signature for
    validity, this will detect bugs in the MPI implementation which could
    result in a revealed secret key, too.

    (BTW: Werner Koch, the GnuPG maintainer, is currently not very
    well-connected to the Net, so please do not bombard him with e-mail.)

    --
    Florian Weimer 	                  Florian.WeimerRUS.Uni-Stuttgart.DE
    University of Stuttgart           http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/
    RUS-CERT                          +49-711-685-5973/fax +49-711-685-5898