Lesson plan

Padding oracle attack

In cryptography, a padding oracle attack is an attack which uses the padding validation of a cryptographic message to decrypt the ciphertext. In cryptography, variable-length plaintext messages often have to be padded (expanded) to be compatible with the underlying cryptographic primitive. The attack relies on having a "padding oracle" which freely responds to queries about whether a message is correctly padded or not. The information could be directly given, or leaked through a side-channel. The earliest well-known attack that uses a padding oracle is Bleichenbacher's attack of 1998, which attacks RSA with PKCS #1 v1.5 padding. The term "padding oracle" appeared in literature in 2002, after Serge Vaudenay's attack on the CBC mode decryption used within symmetric block ciphers. Variants of both attacks continue to find success more than one decade after their original publication.

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Article summary

In cryptography, a padding oracle attack is an attack which uses the padding validation of a cryptographic message to decrypt the ciphertext. In cryptography, variable-length plaintext messages often have to be padded (expanded) to be compatible with the underlying cryptographic primitive. The attack relies on having a "padding oracle" which freely responds to queries about whether a message is correctly padded or not. The information could be directly given, or leaked through a side-channel. The earliest well-known attack that uses a padding oracle is Bleichenbacher's attack of 1998, which attacks RSA with PKCS #1 v1.5 padding. The term "padding oracle" appeared in literature in 2002, after Serge Vaudenay's attack on the CBC mode decryption used within symmetric block ciphers. Variants of both attacks continue to find success more than one decade after their original publication.

Key claims

  1. publication date: 2002 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95
  2. publication date: 2013 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. The record states that the publication date is "2002". What evidence would count against this claim?
  3. The record states that the publication date is "2013". What evidence would count against this claim?
  4. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  5. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

  1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1378649522

Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.