UC San Diego researchers demonstrated an RSA attack that impersonates hardware security modules without extracting keys.
Regulation & Gov ·
Researchers from UC San Diego and France's INRIA demonstrated that RSA signatures on a 1,024-bit key can be forged inside a hardware security module without extracting the key, requiring approximately 4 billion signing requests and 1,380 CPU core-years. The attack exploited an unpadded signing mode after disabling the device's FIPS security setting, but the researchers note the technique likely poses no immediate risk to modern RSA implementations that use standard padding. Bitcoin and Ethereum employ elliptic-curve signatures rather than RSA, so the vulnerability does not affect these blockchains.