In cryptography, a padding oracle attack is an attack which uses the padding validation of a cryptographic message to decrypt the ciphertext. In cryptography, variable-length plaintext messages often have to be padded (expanded) to be compatible with the underlying cryptographic primitive. The attack relies on having a "padding oracle" who freely responds to queries about whether a message is correctly padded or not. Padding oracle attacks are mostly associated with CBC mode decryption used within block ciphers. Padding modes for asymmetric algorithms such as OAEP may also be vulnerable to padding oracle attacks. Symmetric cryptography In symmetric cryptography, the padding oracle attack can be applied to the CBC mode of operation, where the "oracle" (usually a server) leaks data about whether the padding of an encrypted message is correct or not. Such data can allow attackers to decrypt (and sometimes encrypt) messages through the oracle using the oracle's key, without knowing the encryption key. Padding oracle attack on CBC encryption The standard implementation of CBC decryption in block ciphers is to decrypt all ciphertext blocks, validate the padding, remove the PKCS7 padding, and return the message's plaintext. If the server returns an "invalid padding" error instead of a generic "decryption failed" error, the attacker can use the server as a padding oracle to decrypt (and sometimes encrypt) messages. The mathematical formula for CBC decryption is As depicted above, CBC decryption XORs each plaintext block with the previous block. As a result, a single-byte modification in block will make a corresponding change to a single byte in . Suppose the attacker has two ciphertext blocks and wants to decrypt the second block to get plaintext . The attacker changes the last byte of (creating ) and sends to the server. The server then returns whether or not the padding of the last decrypted block () is correct (a valid PKCS#7 padding). If the padding is correct, the attacker now knows that the last byte of is , the last two bytes are 0x02, the last three bytes are 0x03, …, or the last eight bytes are 0x08. The attacker can modify the second-last byte (flip any bit) to ensure that the last byte is 0x01. (Alternatively, the attacker can flip earlier bytes and binary search for the position to identify the padding. For example, if modifying the third-last byte is correct, but modifying the second-last byte is incorrect, then the last