Understanding Bleichenbacher’s CRYPTO’98 Padding Oracle Attack on RSA Encryption

In 1998, Daniel Bleichenbacher published a method for cracking RSA encryption with PKCS#1v15 padding, given access to a “padding oracle”. I learned of this attack via the cryptopals challenges, where it is featured in challenge #47 and #48. The instructions for the challenge state: “We recommend you just use the raw math from the paper and not spend too much time trying to grok how the math…