Adaptive chosen ciphertext attack
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An adaptive chosen ciphertext attack is an interactive form of chosen ciphertext attack in which an attacker sends a number of ciphertexts to be decrypted, then uses the results of these decryptions to select subsequent ciphertexts. The goal of this attack is to gradually reveal information about an encrypted message, or about the decryption key itself. For public-key systems, adaptive chosen ciphertexts are generally applicable only when they have the property of ciphertext malleability — that is, a ciphertext can be modified in specific ways that will have a predictable effect on the decryption of that message.
Practical attacks
Adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks were largely considered to be a theoretical concern until 1998, when Daniel Bleichenbacher of Bell Laboratories demonstrated a practical attack against systems using RSA encryption in concert with the PKCS #1 v1 encoding function, including a version of the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Protocol used by thousands of web servers at the time.
The Bleichenbacher attacks took advantage of flaws within the PKCS #1 function to gradually reveal the content of an RSA encrypted message. Doing this requires sending several million test ciphertexts to the decryption device (eg, SSL-equipped web server.) In practical terms, this means that an SSL session key can be exposed in a reasonable amount of time, perhaps a day or less.
Preventing attacks
In order to prevent adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks, it is necessary to use an encryption or encoding scheme that limits ciphertext malleability. A number of encoding schemes have been proposed; the most common standard for RSA encryption is Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding (OAEP). Unlike ad-hoc schemes such as the padding used in PKCS #1 v1, OAEP is provably secure under the random oracle model.
Any cryptographic system which is plaintext aware is secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack.
References
- Daniel Bleichenbacher, Chosen Ciphertext Attacks Against Protocols Based on the RSA Encryption Standard PKCS #1, CRYPTO 1998, pp1–12.