Themes from Real World Crypto 2022

Summary: At Real World Crypto 2022 in Amsterdam, over 500 cryptographers met in person for the first time in over two years, and presenters detailed two critical weaknesses in Samsung's TEEGRIS TrustZone OS: an IV reuse attack that extracts hardware-protected keys and a downgrade attack that leaves patched flagship devices exposed, reported as CVE-2021-25444 and CVE-2021-25490. Other talks covered a survey of 44 cryptographers across 27 open-source projects in which only 17 had used automated tools to find timing vulnerabilities, and an analysis of over 800,000 real-world ElGamal keys that found roughly 2,000 vulnerable to practical plaintext recovery.
What's compelling: Ordinary users now touch secure enclaves through password managers and WebAuthn without knowing it, so a flaw in trusted hardware is a direct risk to individual users rather than a niche concern. And with only 17 of 44 cryptography library developers using automated timing-attack tooling despite near-universal awareness, the gap between knowing about a class of bug and actually hunting for it is where exploitable code survives.

Read the original at Trail of Bits Blog ↗

Mentions: CVE-2021-25444