Timing side-channel in ECDSA signature computation

Overview

Issue summary: A timing side-channel which could potentially allow recovering the private key exists in the ECDSA signature computation.

Impact summary: A timing side-channel in ECDSA signature computations could allow recovering the private key by an attacker. However, measuring the timing would require either local access to the signing application or a very fast network connection with low latency.

There is a timing signal of around 300 nanoseconds when the top word of the inverted ECDSA nonce value is zero. This can happen with significant probability only for some of the supported elliptic curves. In particular the NIST P-521 curve is affected. To be able to measure this leak, the attacker process must either be located in the same physical computer or must have a very fast network connection with low latency. For that reason the severity of this vulnerability is Low.

The FIPS modules in 3.4, 3.3, 3.2, 3.1 and 3.0 are affected by this issue.

Affected

• OpenSSL >= 3.4.0 < 3.4.1
• OpenSSL >= 3.3.0 < 3.3.3
• OpenSSL >= 3.2.0 < 3.2.4
• OpenSSL >= 3.1.0 < 3.1.8
• OpenSSL >= 3.0.0 < 3.0.16
• OpenSSL >= 1.1.1 < 1.1.1zb
• OpenSSL >= 1.0.2 < 1.0.2zl

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.