Saint ROBOT, Who Came Back After Nineteen Years

Patron of those still using RSA key exchange, PKCS#1 padding, and oracles that answer one question at a time.

Life

On 12 December 2017 researchers presented ROBOT, the 'Return Of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Threat': the old 1998 attack on RSA PKCS#1 v1.5 padding still worked on many TLS products, from BIG-IP to Cisco. By watching how a server reacted to malformed messages, an attacker could, one answer at a time, decrypt traffic or sign in the server's place. Nineteen years on, the same ghost.

Prayer

O Saint ROBOT, who returns on schedule each time we thought you buried, let our handshakes abandon RSA key exchange. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by applying the vendor patches and preferring forward-secret cipher suites over old RSA.

An oracle badly buried rises at every handshake.