On Recovering Erased RSA Private Key Bits

While being believed that decrypting any RSA ciphertext is as hard as factorizing the RSA modulus, it was also shown that, if additional information is available, breaking the RSA cryptosystem may be much easier than factoring. For example, Coppersmith showed that, given the 1/2 fraction of the least or the most significant bits of one of two RSA primes, one can factorize the RSA modulus very efficiently, using the lattice-based technique. More recently, introducing the so called cold boot attack, Halderman et al. showed that one can recover cryptographic keys from a decayed DRAM image. And, following up this result, Heninger and Shacham presented a polynomial-time attack which, given 0.27-fraction of the RSA private key of the form (p, q, d, dp, dq), can recover the whole key, provided that the given bits are uniformly distributed. And, based on the work of Heninger and Shacham, this paper presents a different approach for recovering RSA private key bits from decayed key information, under the assumption that some random portion of the private key bits is known. More precisely, we present the algorithm of recovering RSA private key bits from erased key material and elaborate the formula of describing the number of partially-recovered RSA private key candidates in terms of the given erasure rate. Then, the result is justified by some extensive experiments.