sad-rsa

A hardened pure Rust RSA implementation with protection against timing side-channel attacks.

This is a security-focused fork of the RustCrypto RSA crate that implements implicit rejection for PKCS#1 v1.5 decryption to mitigate the Marvin Attack (RUSTSEC-2023-0071).

Security Improvements

Feature	sad-rsa	upstream rsa
Marvin Attack mitigation	Yes	No
Implicit rejection (PKCS#1 v1.5)	Default	Not implemented
RFC 8017 length validation	Yes	Partial
Key material zeroization	Enhanced	Basic

Implicit Rejection

Instead of returning distinguishable errors for invalid PKCS#1 v1.5 padding, this crate returns a deterministic pseudo-random message derived from the ciphertext. This makes valid and invalid ciphertexts indistinguishable to attackers, preventing padding oracle attacks.

Implementation follows draft-irtf-cfrg-rsa-guidance-04.

Usage

Replace rsa with sad-rsa in your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
sad-rsa = "0.1"

The API is fully compatible with the upstream rsa crate:

use sad_rsa::{Pkcs1v15Encrypt, RsaPrivateKey, RsaPublicKey};

let mut rng = rand::thread_rng();
let bits = 2048;
let priv_key = RsaPrivateKey::new(&mut rng, bits).expect("failed to generate a key");
let pub_key = RsaPublicKey::from(&priv_key);

// Encrypt
let data = b"hello world";
let enc_data = pub_key.encrypt(&mut rng, Pkcs1v15Encrypt, &data[..]).expect("failed to encrypt");
assert_ne!(&data[..], &enc_data[..]);

// Decrypt - now protected against Marvin attack
let dec_data = priv_key.decrypt(Pkcs1v15Encrypt, &enc_data).expect("failed to decrypt");
assert_eq!(&data[..], &dec_data[..]);

Migration from `rsa`

Replace rsa with sad-rsa in Cargo.toml
Replace use rsa:: with use sad_rsa:: in your code
That's it - the API is identical

Note: Invalid ciphertexts will now return synthetic messages instead of errors. If your code explicitly checks for decryption errors to detect tampering, you should use authenticated encryption (e.g., RSA-OAEP or hybrid encryption with AES-GCM) instead.

Performance

Note: Key generation is much faster when building with higher optimization levels:
[profile.dev]
opt-level = 2

Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV)

This crate supports Rust 1.85 or higher.

Attribution

This crate is a fork of the excellent RustCrypto RSA crate. We are grateful to the RustCrypto developers for their foundational work.

See the NOTICE file for full attribution details.

License

Licensed under either of

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

sad-rsa 0.1.0