Versions of ed25519-dalek prior to v2.0 model private and public keys as separate types which can be assembled into a Keypair, and also provide APIs for serializing and deserializing 64-byte private/public keypairs.

Such APIs and serializations are inherently unsafe as the public key is one of the inputs used in the deterministic computation of the S part of the signature, but not in the R value. An adversary could somehow use the signing function as an oracle that allows arbitrary public keys as input can obtain two signatures for the same message sharing the same R and only differ on the S part.

Unfortunately, when this happens, one can easily extract the private key.

Revised public APIs in v2.0 of ed25519-dalek do NOT allow a decoupled private/public keypair as signing input, except as part of specially labeled "hazmat" APIs which are clearly labeled as being dangerous if misused.

Impact

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, however work is underway to migrate to a fully constant-time implementation.

Workarounds

The only currently available workaround is to avoid using the rsa crate in settings where attackers are able to observe timing information, e.g. 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.