On Sat, Apr 25, 2015 at 12:49:21AM +0000, Perrow, Graeme wrote: > Using OpenSSL 1.0.1m on 64-bit Windows and Linux. > > I have implemented RSA encryption using the RSA_public_encrypt and > RSA_private_decrypt functions and various padding types. This is working > fine except that in very rare cases, my test fails because decrypting > succeeds when it should fail. I'm basically doing this (pseudocode): > > RSA_public_encrypt( "abc", encrypted_data, my_public_key, RSA_PKCS1_OAEP_PADDING ); > RSA_private_decrypt( encrypted_data, decrypted_data, my_private_key, RSA_NO_PADDING ); A real code fragment would be substantially more useful that "pseudo-code" here. This should *always* succeed, provided you pass the correct length to RSA_private_decrypt. From the manpage: flen must be ... and exactly RSA_size(rsa) for RSA_NO_PADDING. > Note that the padding types are different. The vast majority of the time, > I get an error from the RSA_private_decrypt call but now and again, it > succeeds. You're doing something wrong, it should always recover the OAEP padded data, which is basically random, you need to reverse the OAEP padding to recover the plaintext. > I don't understand the underlying crypto well enough to know - is it > possible for RSA_private_decrypt to be unable to tell that the wrong > padding was used, or is this a bug in OpenSSL? When not using padding, that's not "wrong" padding, you're just doing a raw RSA decrypt, and any input that is smaller than the modulus (but has the same bit length) should decrypt to something. -- Viktor.