Paper 2008/510 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2008/510 ↗

Reconstructing RSA Private Keys from Random Key Bits

Nadia Heninger
Hovav Shacham
Abstract

We show that an RSA private key with small public exponent can be efficiently recovered given a 0.27 fraction of its bits at random. An important application of this work is to the "cold boot" attacks of Halderman et al. We make new observations about the structure of RSA keys that allow our algorithm to make use of the redundant information in the typical storage format of an RSA private key. Our algorithm itself is elementary and does not make use of the lattice techniques used in other RSA key reconstruction problems. We give an analysis of the running time behavior of our algorithm that matches the threshold phenomenon observed in our experiments.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Public-key cryptography
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2010-02-26: last updated
2008-12-02: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2008/510
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2008/510,
      author = {Nadia Heninger and Hovav Shacham},
      title = {Reconstructing RSA Private Keys from Random Key Bits},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2008/510},
      year = {2008},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2008/510}
}
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