29.03.2019 - Marcus Brinkmann

We published a paper on padding oracle attacks at the USENIX Security Symposium 2019. In this paper, we describe and evaluate a scanning methodology with which we found several padding oracle vulnerabilities in devices from various vendors. In total, we found that 1.83% of the Alexa Top 1 Million have padding oracle vulnerabilities.

To test whether a server is vulnerable, we specified different padding oracle vectors which we send to the system under test, using different cipher suites and protocol versions. If the server does not behave identically (on both the TLS and TCP layers), we consider it to be vulnerable to a padding oracle attack, since it is leaking information about the plaintext via behavior differences. Depending on the responses to such padding oracle vectors, one can estimate which implementation is responsible for the vulnerability. We contacted quite a few website owners and tried to cooperate with them, to find out which vendors and TLS stacks are responsible for the identified vulnerabilities. You can find our current disclosure status on this issue in our software repository.

We are currently in contact with other vendors to fix the remaining vulnerabilities, but the some of the rare (in terms of the number of affected hosts) vulnerabilities are currently not attributed. To fix the remaining vulnerabilities, we ask for your assistance to help get rid of this issue. For this purpose, we integrated a standalone version of our padding oracle evaluation tool into our TLS-Scanner (v.2.7) project. This tool allows you (among other things) to evaluate if a specific server is vulnerable.

A detailed tutorial on using the tool can be found in our blog.