Adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack

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An adaptive-chosen-ciphertext attack (abbreviated as CCA2) 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. It is to be distinguished from an indifferent-chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA1).

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.