RUSTSEC-2023-0071: Marvin Attack: potential key recovery through timing sidechannels
medium 6 affectedImpact
Due to a non-constant-time implementation, information about the private key is leaked through timing information which is observable over the network. An attacker may be able to use that information to recover the key.
Patches
No patch is yet available. The crypto-bigint migration (RustCrypto/RSA#394) did not close this. Tracking is RustCrypto/RSA#626 (padding still not constant-time). Implicit rejection work is in RustCrypto/RSA#680; default-path blinding is in RustCrypto/RSA#702.
Still affected as of 2026-09-12: rsa 0.9.10 (latest stable) and rsa 0.10.0-rc.18 (latest). patched = [] is intentional.
Workarounds
Avoid using the rsa crate in settings where attackers can observe timing, for example over the network. Local use on a non-compromised computer is fine.
References
This vulnerability was discovered as part of the "Marvin Attack", which revealed several implementations of RSA including OpenSSL had not properly mitigated timing sidechannel attacks.