KRACK who? ROCA is the Next Trouble Maker

Holy Crap! First KRACK and now ROCA? Guess this isn’t a favorable week for “The protectors of the realm!”
It has been a frenzied week in the cybersecurity world. The crack which KRACK left behind was on the verge of a fix however before the experts could resolve it, even bigger bombs were dropped.

Say hello to ROCA, a quite complicated and an outstandingly dangerous weakness discovered in widely used cryptography chips manufactured by a German organization which runs by the name of Infineon Technologies. Renowned manufacturers like Google, Fujitsu, Lenovo, HP as well as Microsoft have all pushed out fixes for their relevant software and hardware asking their users to update where they can, again!

A recent revelation by Mathy Vanhoef, a Post-Doctoral researcher in cybersecurity, exposed a major flaw in the WPA2 protocol which allows any hacker within the Wi-Fi range of the victim to abuse the security protocol between them by using Key Reinstallation Attacks or what Vanhoef is calling it, the KRACK technique.

Vanhoef demonstrated his findings by attacking the WPA2 protocol and manipulating the 4-way handshake on an Android smartphone. His attack was not limited to recover the victim’s login credentials only, in fact, according to him any information that the user sends or receives is possible to decrypt. As a result, the victim witnesses the insecurity of communicating his sensitive information such as bank account numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, emails, photos etc. through his Wi-Fi network.

Now to comprehend the significance of the academic findings concerning ROCA, a summary on the fundamentals of the “Public Key Encryption” is required. To begin with, a public and a private key are originated from two hefty prime numbers being multiplied together. Those prime numbers are meant to be kept as a secret at all times and it should be exceedingly challenging for a third party to determine them. It is extremely difficult to presume the factors of the enormous sum, even if one of the prime numbers has already been identified. Nevertheless, anybody who can get a hold on both of those original prime numbers can easily generate a key pair and read messages.

The researchers from the Centre for Research on Cryptography and Security, Enigma Bridge,
Ca’ Foscari University and Masaryk University, constructed the ROCA hack which technically is a newer version of a longstanding technique known as the Coppersmith’s attack. ROCA, which stands for the “Return of Coppersmith’s Attack”, depends on the fact that the publicly shared number or the modulus, can actually be factored to disclose the critical prime numbers.

According to the researchers, Infineon did not check that its moduli was not factorable, hence masses of devices are now considered to be highly vulnerable. Furthermore, the researchers warned that “The current confirmed number of vulnerable keys discovered are nearly 760,000 but there is a possibility of two to three magnitudes of greater vulnerability.” Their complete research will be presented later this month at the ACM Conference on Computer & Communication Security.

Professor Alan Woodward, a cryptography specialist at the University of Surrey, states that there are limitations to the attacks. In his opinion, the attacks probably are only practical against 1024 bit keys and not on 2048 as the higher the bits, the bigger the number, therefore, much harder to factor those primes.

Jake Williams, former NSA staffer and chief of cybersecurity company Rendition Sec, theorized two attacks through ROCA. First, by abusing the code signing certificates which are used to authenticate that the software is coming from a reliable source. Second, it is possible to check whether the keys are defenseless by visiting https://keychest.net/roca and entering the public key over there.

He said, “With the help of a code signing certificate’s public key, any attacker could derive the private key permitting them to sign the software which is imitating the victim.”
There is a possibility for the attacker to fool a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) which is a specialized chip on a computer or a smartphone which stores the RSA encryption keys, and inject malicious or untrusted codes. Williams further warned, “The TPM is used to safeguard the code which is used to boot the kernel. Dodging a TPM allows the attacker to perform their attack where they virtualize the host’s operating system. There are a dozen varieties of other attacks, however, this weakness in the Infineon chips are considered as an enormous threat in HSMs (Hardware Security Modules) and TPMs.”

According to the local media, the national ID card system of Estonia has also been affected by this weakness with the numbers reaching up to 750,000 by now, exposing severe identity theft threats.

To further advise the concerned users, Microsoft, Infineon, and Google took the liberty of staying ahead of this revelation and have put out warnings and notices in the previous week. With the availability of the patches, the first safeguarding option the users and the IT teams should undoubtedly consider are vendor updates. Hopefully, the saviors will come around with the patches for the general public in the near future and save us all from this Armageddon!