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YubiKeys are vulnerable to cloning attacks thanks to newly discovered side channel (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 3 months ago (4 children)

The attacker would need physical possession of the YubiKey, Security Key, or YubiHSM, knowledge of the accounts they want to target and specialized equipment to perform the necessary attack. Depending on the use case, the attacker may also require additional knowledge including username, PIN, account password, or authentication key.

The attacks require about $11,000 worth of equipment and a sophisticated understanding of electrical and cryptographic engineering. The difficulty of the attack means it would likely be carried out only by nation-states or other entities with comparable resources and then only in highly targeted scenarios. The likelihood of such an attack being used widely in the wild is extremely low.

Given this massive caveat I'd almost call that headline misleading

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

I would argue that if the attacker has physical possession of my yubikey, that alone means the accounts tied to it are vulnerable. While the information isn't technically wrong, I feel like that headline is misleading and this isn't as big of a deal as some would like to make it out as.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Knowledge of the account is an obvious caveat. Yubikey-based MFA is an added layer of protection for accounts, so any kind of attack against MFA assumes the attacker already knows which account to target.

It's like saying "our door lock is flawed, but the attacker would need to have knowledge of the door".

The cost and complexity is what's noteworthy and is more relevant. Although attack cost and complexity usuallu goes down with advances in tooling and research. So it may be a good idea to plan a progressive retirement of affected keys.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

"Our door lock is flawed, but the attacker would need physical access to the key"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Cheaper just to beat you until you give them what they want.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

The fact that this happened is surprising in general, but not super practical.

What’s the big deal? A: It affects other types of hardware which also used these crypto libraries. Some are easier to address than others.