New way to break RSA encryption

“Signature forgery” or “Signature forgery“. This is a new way to crack RSA keys — and it doesn’t require factorization. Ars Technica he says a new research that uses classical computing power to “reduce the current level of RSA security to an unacceptably low limit” and reduce the required computing resources by several orders of magnitude.

There is “a gap in current RSA-style security assumptions,” according to a study co-authored by University of California, San Diego professor Nadia Heninger. She argues that this gap “provides classical cryptanalytic evidence in favor of abandoning RSA altogether during the current transition to the post-quantum era.”

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The practical risk is limited, but remains significant. Implementing the attack on 1024-bit keys (the use of which has now been discontinued) took several months on an academic CPU cluster — significantly less time than current estimates for factoring 1024-bit keys, which would require resources that only states or corporations with enormous power could afford.

Widely used RSA implementations remain secure. Nevertheless, the research surprised the cryptography community… “If this result is confirmed after peer review, it would truly be a landmark conceptual innovation,” Karsten Nohl, cryptography expert and head of innovation at Allurity, said in an interview. “RSA was thought to be as difficult to break as factoring large integers — or so we thought. The researcher showed us that it is practically possible to break RSA without breaking its key…”

The key forgery attack developed by Heninger and the other researchers poses a direct threat to 1024-bit RSA. Even for 2048- and 4096-bit keys, the method reduces RSA's security to unacceptable levels. Organizations such as the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) , and the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) require that every cryptosystem provide a security level of at least 128 bits, which means that the required operations must exceed 2^128. The forgery attack reduces these levels to 2⁶⁵, 2⁹⁰, and 2¹¹⁹ for 1024-, 2048-, and 4096-bit keys, respectively. These levels could be further reduced, as Heninger's team did all the coding manually, without using artificial intelligence or graphics processing units (GPUs) to perform the forgeries. The researcher said these tools will "almost certainly" reduce security levels even further.

The attack only works against blind signature RSA implementations … However, some real-world systems still use blind signature RSA — also known as “textbook RSA” (basic/simplified form of RSA)…

The authors of the study and other researchers emphasize that the new attack poses minimal risk to real-world applications. However, it drastically reduces the estimated security of textbook RSA, and in a way that was previously unknown... The new attack will make it even more urgent to completely abandon this cryptosystem.

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