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Factorable Keys: Twice As Many, But Half As Bad

Posted by Unknown on from the keep-on-factoring dept.

J. Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger write in with an update to yesterday's story on RSA key security: "Yesterday Slashdot posted that RSA keys are 99.8% secure in the real world. We've been working on this concurrently, and as it turns out, the story is a bit more complicated. Those factorable keys are generated by your router and VPN, not bankofamerica.com. The geeky details are pretty nifty: we downloaded every SSL and SSH keys on the internet in a few days, did some math on 100 million digit numbers, and ended up with 27,000 private keys. (That's 0.4% of SSL keys in current use.) We posted a long blog post summarizing our findings over at Freedom to Tinker."

2 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Re:slashdotted by Yvan256 · · Score: 1, Funny

    All I see is a wall of text.

  2. Re:Dont these keys change often? How would you mat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Quick! Everybody log in as "Anonymous Coward" before he changes it!