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Commit b9a380f7 authored by Nicola Tuveri's avatar Nicola Tuveri
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Make BN_num_bits() consttime upon BN_FLG_CONSTTIME

This issue was partially addressed by commit
972c87df

, which hardened its callee
BN_num_bits_word() to avoid leaking the most-significant word of its
argument via branching and memory access pattern.
The commit message also reported:
> There are a few places where BN_num_bits is called on an input where
> the bit length is also secret. This does *not* fully resolve those
> cases as we still only look at the top word.

BN_num_bits() is called directly or indirectly (e.g., through
BN_num_bytes() or BN_bn2binpad() ) in various parts of the `crypto/ec`
code, notably in all the currently supported implementations of scalar
multiplication (in the generic path through ec_scalar_mul_ladder() as
well as in dedicated methods like ecp_nistp{224,256,521}.c and
ecp_nistz256.c).

Under the right conditions, a motivated SCA attacker could retrieve the
secret bitlength of a secret nonce through this vulnerability,
potentially leading, ultimately, to recover a long-term secret key.

With this commit, exclusively for BIGNUMs that are flagged with
BN_FLG_CONSTTIME, instead of accessing only bn->top, all the limbs of
the BIGNUM are accessed up to bn->dmax and bitwise masking is used to
avoid branching.

Memory access pattern still leaks bn->dmax, the size of the lazily
allocated buffer for representing the BIGNUM, which is inevitable with
the current BIGNUM architecture: reading past bn->dmax would be an
out-of-bound read.
As such, it's the caller responsibility to ensure that bn->dmax does not
leak secret information, by explicitly expanding the internal BIGNUM
buffer to a public value sufficient to avoid any lazy reallocation
while manipulating it: this should be already done at the top level
alongside setting the BN_FLG_CONSTTIME.

Thanks to David Schrammel and Samuel Weiser for reporting this issue
through responsible disclosure.

Reviewed-by: default avatarMatt Caswell <matt@openssl.org>
Reviewed-by: default avatarBernd Edlinger <bernd.edlinger@hotmail.de>
(Merged from https://github.com/openssl/openssl/pull/9511)

(cherry picked from commit 8b44198b916015f77bef1befa26edb48ad8a0238)
parent 083f297a
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