Well, we all knew they were, really… Computer and Information Security after all does (amongst other things) encompass availability and integrity, which can both be impacted by poor environment controls in the data-centre. There’s a popular adage that states that once a person has physical access, all bets are off, but all bets could be off if temperature is above operational parameters, or dirty power is introducing short-duration transient faults. New research has demonstrated a proof-of-concept attack against OpenSSL, and unlike side-channel attacks such as differential power analysis, the effect of these short-duration transient faults upon cryptographic signatures can be sampled without physical access to the device, assuming the signatures are sent via a network session.
The proof-of-concept involved induced short-duration transient faults, which resulted in recovery of private key bits. The remaining phase-space was explored on an eighty-one node cluster, and yielded a 1024-bit RSA key in approximately one-hundred hours. So far, this is difficult to induce, but the researchers state “If environmental conditions (such as high temperatures or voltage manipulation by an attacker) slow down the signal propagation in the system, it is possible that signals through the critical path do not reach their corresponding registers or latches before the next clock cycle begins.” (Pellegrini, A., Bertacco, V. & Austin, T. 2010)
Pellegrini, A., Bertacco, V. & Austin, T. (2010) ‘Fault-Based Attack of RSA Authentication’, University of Michigan [Online]. Available from: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~valeria/research/publications/DATE10RSA.pdf (Accessed 5th March 2010).
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