Therefore, the researchers advise the users to switch to the more secure hardware security keys. Nonetheless, for the most determined adversaries, executing such attacks isn’t entirely impossible. The main limitation here is that the attacker should have explicit and prolonged physical access to the target security key to clone it.īesides, the overall experimental setup is quite expensive to afford for an average attacker. While the attack sounds almost perfect to extract private keys and ruin the security of U2F authentication, it isn’t feasible for real-time attacks due to several limitations. Google Titan Security Key (all versions).Precisely, the list of vulnerable products includes the following, Whereas, regarding the vulnerable products, this attack affects many hardware security keys, which predominantly include the Google Titan Security Keys. The vulnerability has received the identifier CVE-2021-3011. To understand the ECDSA engine, they took the help of Rhea (NXP J3D081 JavaCard smartcard) that implements the same cryptographic library.Įventually, they could recover the private key from Rhea, and in turn, from Google Titan keys as well. Whereas, exploiting the electromagnetic radiations of the chip during the cryptographic process could possibly allow recovering the private key. The chip basically implements ECDSA signatures as the core cryptography.

In turn, it lets the adversary break into the victims’ accounts.īriefly, in their study, the researchers aimed at the Google Titan Security Key, targeting its NXP A700X chip. Targeting the secure chip this way allows the attacker to make a clone of the security key. As disclosed via their post, a side-channel attack can possibly allow an adversary to target the secure element in U2F-based hardware security keys and extract the encryption key. Researchers from NinjaLab have found a way to clone hardware security keys threatening U2F security. Nonetheless, the overall attack has numerous limitations which still make using U2F security keys a better choice. However, researchers have found how to clone these hardware security keys, thus risking the account security. Hardware security keys are among the most robust account security tools of today.

Usb hardware key hack