README

RSAKeyFinder 1.0 (2008-07-18)
By Nadia Heninger and J. Alex Halderman

This program illustrates automatic techniques for locating RSA
private and public keys in a captured memory image, as described in
Section 6.2 of the research paper:

  J. A. Halderman, S. D. Schoen, N. Heninger, W. Clarkson, W. Paul,
  J. A. Calandrino, A. J. Feldman, J. Appelbaum, and E. W. Felten.
  "Lest We Remember: Cold-Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys."
  Proc. 17th USENIX Security Symposium (Sec '08), San Jose, CA, July 2008.

For more information, see: http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/


There are two simple approaches:

a) The first method requires a modulus from a known public key. The
program searches for the modulus and attempts to parse the surrounding
data as a BER-encoded public or private key.

b) The second method does not require any knowledge of the key.  The
program searches for a fixed pattern--the BER-encoded RSA version
field followed by the integer type of the following field in an RSA
key--and attempts to parse the surrounding data as a BER-encoded
private key.

We successfully tested these techniques on a Linux system running
Apache 2.2.3 with mod_ssl.  However, RSA implementations that store
keys in memory using a different format will not be susceptible.


USAGE: 

  rsakeyfind MEMORY-IMAGE [MODULUS-FILE]

If MODULUS-FILE is specified, the program uses method (a) and attempts
to locate private and public keys; the MODULUS-FILE should contain a
hex-encoded version of the RSA modulus.  Otherwise, it uses method (b)
and attempts to locate only private keys.