Can We Trust Cryptographic Software? Cryptographic Flaws in GNU Privacy Guard v1.2.3 Phong Q. Nguyen CNRS/Ecole´ normale sup´erieure D´epartement d’informatique 45 rue d’Ulm, 75230 Paris Cedex 05, France.
[email protected] http://www.di.ens.fr/˜pnguyen Abstract. More and more software use cryptography. But how can one know if what is implemented is good cryptography? For proprietary soft- ware, one cannot say much unless one proceeds to reverse-engineering, and history tends to show that bad cryptography is much more frequent than good cryptography there. Open source software thus sounds like a good solution, but the fact that a source code can be read does not imply that it is actually read, especially by cryptography experts. In this paper, we illustrate this point by examining the case of a basic In- ternet application of cryptography: secure email. We analyze parts of thesourcecodeofthelatestversionofGNUPrivacyGuard(GnuPGor GPG), a free open source alternative to the famous PGP software, com- pliant with the OpenPGP standard, and included in most GNU/Linux distributions such as Debian, MandrakeSoft, Red Hat and SuSE. We ob- serve several cryptographic flaws in GPG v1.2.3. The most serious flaw has been present in GPG for almost four years: we show that as soon as one (GPG-generated) ElGamal signature of an arbitrary message is released, one can recover the signer’s private key in less than a second on a PC. As a consequence, ElGamal signatures and the so-called ElGamal sign+encrypt keys have recently been removed from GPG.