Padding Oracle Attacks on the ISO CBC Mode Encryption Standard

Abstract. In [8] Vaudenay presented an attack on block cipher CBCmode encryption when a particular padding method is used. In this paper, we employ a similar approach to analyse the padding methods of the ISO CBC-mode encryption standard. We show that, for several of the padding methods referred to by this standard, we can exploit an oracle returning padding correctness information to efficiently extract plaintext bits. In particular, for one padding scheme, we can extract all plaintext bits with a near-optimal number of oracle queries. For a second scheme, we can efficiently extract plaintext bits from the last (or last-but-one) ciphertext block, and obtain plaintext bits from other blocks faster than exhaustive search. Keywords padding oracle attack, CBC-mode encryption, ISO standard

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CTRSA
• Authors: Kenneth G. Paterson, Arnold K. L. Yau
• Keywords: Cryptology, CTRSA 2004, Padding, Padding Methods, Plaintext Bits