Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

Critical Vulnerability in Chromebook. Google Urges Users to Update

         

engine

4:30 pm on Sep 12, 2019 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



A critical vulnerability in affected Chromebooks means that Google urges users to update the "built-in security key."
We discovered a vulnerability in the H1 security chip firmware concerning ECDSA signature generation. The firmware code used incompatible transfer instructions when passing a critical secret value to the cryptographic hardware block, resulting in generating secret values of a specific structure and having a significant loss of entropy in the secret value (64 bits instead of 256 bits). We confirmed that the incorrect generation of the secret value allows it to be recovered, which in turn allows the the underlying ECC private key to be obtained. Thus, attackers that have a single pair of signature and signed data can effectively compute the private key, breaking any functionality or protocols that use the key pair in question.

This page lists affected devices and details of the firmware fix.
[sites.google.com...]