Format Oracles on OpenPGP

The principle of padding oracle attacks has been known in the cryptography research community since 1998. It has been generalized to exploit any property of decrypted ciphertexts, either stemming from the encryption scheme, or the application data format. However, this attack principle is being leveraged time and again against proposed standards and real-world applications. This may be attributed to several factors, e.g., the backward compatibility with standards selecting oracle-prone mechanisms, the difficulty of safely implementing decryption operations, and the misuse of libraries by non cryptography-savvy developers. In this article, we present several format oracles discovered in applications and libraries implementing the OpenPGP message format, among which the popular GnuPG application. We show that, if the oracles they implement are made available to an adversary, e.g., by a front-end application, he can, by querying repeatedly these oracles, decrypt all OpenPGP symmetrically encrypted packets. The corresponding asymptotic query complexities range from 2 to \(2^8\) oracle requests per plaintext byte to recover.