Saint Bleichenbacher's Cat, of the Nine Lives

Patron of RSA implementations that go wrong again, recycled oracle attacks, and bugs with seven lives too many.

Life

On 30 November 2018 a group that included, among others, Eyal Ronen and Adi Shamir showed "the nine lives of Bleichenbacher's cat": the old RSA padding-oracle attack, thought buried, returned as a cache-based side channel. Several TLS libraries, Mozilla's NSS among them, once again leaked enough information to allow decrypting traffic. Like a cat, the attack had plenty of lives to spare (CVE-2018-12404 and others).

Prayer

O Saint Bleichenbacher's Cat, who rises again at every careless implementation, let our libraries not hand the attacker an oracle. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating NSS and the other TLS libraries and preferring key exchange that does not depend on RSA.

A cryptographic cat always has one more life.