DRM To Face New Challenge ?

[GhostShip]

Good news folks, it seems some aspects of cryptography previously claimed as secure are no longer so and this could affect the security of some DRM systems rendering them useless.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/23/rsa_side-channel_crypto_attack/

Security researchers have developed a new approach to breaking the RSA algorithm that creates new problems for the development of effective rights management software.

Cryptoanalysts already known the time taken to make different calculations using the same encryption key might, in theory at least, give attackers code-breaking clues in much the same way electro-magnetic leakage or power fluctuations can be used in so-called "side-channel" attacks on secure systems. The new so-called Branch Prediction Analysis (BPA) attack is a refinement on this approach that makes code breaking feasible on commodity PCs instead of expensive high-performance kit.

A carefully written spy-process, running alongside the RSA-process, is able to collect almost all the secret bits used in an RSA signing operation by monitoring the states of a CPU. The approach yields far quicker results than statistical analysis, cryptography researchers say.

"The successful extraction of almost all secret key bits by our SBPA attack against an openSSL RSA implementation proves that the often recommended blinding or so called randomization techniques to protect RSA against side-channel attacks are, in the context of SBPA attacks, totally useless," researchers Onur Aciicmez, Cetin Kaya Koc and Jean-Pierre Seifert report in their paper.

I look forward of course to some interesting results gained from this breakthrough 

[KM]

It means when you do anything with RSA encryption (basically anything secure uses some form of it as it's the only encryption considered secure) then if you have another program on your computer monitoring the process it can obtain the keys used to decrypt it (assuming the program is decrypting and not encrypting)... generally though monitoring of the process to get it from the CPU instructions it executes is a bit long-winded, surely if the program has the keys, merely looking in memory where the key is stored is a simpler idea?

and that is mainly a potential security weakness for any programs you use that are using encryption if your system were to be infeced with a trojan - although in that case i guess it makes little difference as a trojan could read all of your input and output anyway