On the security of practical mail user agents against cache side-channel attacks

Hodong Kim, Hyundo Yoon, Youngjoo Shin, Junbeom Hur

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Mail user agent (MUA) programs provide an integrated interface for email services. Many MUAs support email encryption functionality to ensure the confidentiality of emails. In practice, they encrypt the content of an email using email encryption standards such as OpenPGP or S/MIME, mostly implemented using GnuPG. Despite their widespread deployment, there has been insufficient research on their software structure and the security dependencies among the software components of MUA programs. In order to understand the security implications of the structures and analyze any possible vulnerabilities of MUA programs, we investigated a number of MUAs that support email encryption. As a result, we found severe vulnerabilities in a number of MUAs that allow cache side-channel attacks in virtualized desktop environments. Our analysis reveals that the root cause originates from the lack of verification and control over the third-party cryptographic libraries that they adopt. In order to demonstrate this, we implemented a cache side-channel attack on RSA in GnuPG and then conducted an evaluation of the vulnerability of 13 MUAs that support email encryption in Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 18.04. Based on our experiment, we found that 10 of these MUA programs (representing approximately 77% of existing MUA programs) allow the installation of a vulnerable version of GnuPG, even when the latest version of GnuPG, which is secure against most cache side-channel attacks, is in use. In order to substantiate the importance of the vulnerability we discovered, we conducted a FLUSH+RELOAD attack on these MUA programs and demonstrated that the attack restored 92% of the bits of the 2048-bit RSA private key when the recipients read a single encrypted email.

Original languageEnglish
Article number3770
JournalApplied Sciences (Switzerland)
Volume10
Issue number11
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020 Jun 1

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Funding: This work was supported by the research fund of Signal Intelligence Research Center supervised by the Defense Acquisition Program Administration and Agency for Defense Development of Korea.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 by the authors.

Keywords

  • Cache side-channel attack
  • Desktop virtualization
  • Encrypted email
  • GnuPG
  • Mail user agent

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Materials Science
  • Instrumentation
  • General Engineering
  • Process Chemistry and Technology
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes

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