Slashdot Mirror
Google Starts Upgrading Its SSL Certificates To 2048-bit Keys
An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced it has already started upgrading all of its SSL certificates to 2048-bit keys. The goal is to beef up the encryption on the connections made to its services. Google says the upgrade, which includes the root certificate that the company uses to sign all of its SSL certificates, will be completed 'in the next few months.' Previously, however, Google was more specific and said it was aiming to finish the process by the end of 2013."
If the NSA has the master key...
I wonder how this'll affect older PCs? Aren't SSL communications with larger keys more processor-intensive than when using a smaller key?
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
The largest risk isn't during transmission, it is at the user's end... and Google's end. 2 million bit encryption wouldn't be enough if you had a keylogger, or if google got served a National Security Letter that it decided to honor.
The initial connection setup will be more processor intensive (4x?) but the actual communications isn't done with public/private key encryption. The public/private keys are only used to verify the identity of the server and to exchange a symmetric (AES128 often) key. After the setup, the rest of the transfer will be no more complex and so shouldn't load your PC any more than before.
I've been using 4096 bit keys for over two years. Now if only /. would get into the act (I don't want freaks and weirdos at where ever I use the 'net to know a. what stories I read. b. whether I'm logged in or not. c. if I'm logged in, what my user name and password are).
Also, the moderators are all insufficiently like the "ideal" for their gender (whatever gender that is). E.g. the male identifying mods all have small penis'.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Yes, but unlike almost all other certificates and big websites Google uses elliptic curve diffie hellman, which means something like every user having their own key. That key also changes every day. So after breaking one they would only be able to intercept traffic form that user for 1 day.
So google's certificates give much more security than other ones, even if they use 4096 bit keys.
The Yanks are so used to accessing Google on their bloated 2K TS-1000s, that they seem to have forgetten that those of us with the original British 1K ZX81 won't be able to access their website securely any more.
I bet those tossers are so spoiled they have blackjack and hookers, and 16K rampacks on their servers. Hope someone wobbles them (*) and they lose all their data. Gits.
(*) The rampacks, I mean. I've no idea what wobbling a hooker would do to your data.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
How the fuck is "by the end of 2013" more specific than "in the next few months"? First is a 5 month range, the second "generally" refers to a 2-4 month range. At worst there timeline response hasn't changed.
"By the end of 2013" specifies an exact point in time at which the project will be done - Dec 31st, 2013, if they slip past that date, then they are late. However, "in the next few months" is very non specific, with no universally accepted definition of what it means and can depend on the range being considered -- If I have big bag of M&M's and someone asks me for a "few", they'd probably be disappointed if I gave them 2 - 4. Since "few" is so non-specific, they could stretch it out to 5 months and still claim they are within a "few".
until you disclose how much data *exactly* of how many users on average you're handing over to LEOs per request, I'ma not gonna trust you ever again.
A 768-bit RSA key was factored in late 2009. 1024-bit should be trivial for the NSA, although not trivial in the sense that they don't need to be selective about their target.
Just because there's no known algorithm to factor primes easily doesn't mean that there aren't practical optimizations to help improve performance. Most of the time when you hear that it takes "thousands of years" to factor a prime number, the speaker is only taking into consideration the most brain dead methods. Cryptographers are continually advancing the state-of-the-art. Clock-for-clock, we can factor primes much faster today than just a few years ago. And you can imagine that the NSA is probably far ahead of academia, if only because as an engineering problem they have vastly more experience in the domain. 10% here, 10% there, and before you know it you've improved runtime by 1x, 2x, 10x, etc.
1) Over conservative corporate lawyers who think ECC is a no-go land
2) Fear, uncertainty and doubt about whether certicom will come after you with their lawyers
3) Suspicion by tin foil hat bearers that the NSA are promoting elliptic curve algorithms (in RFC6090) they know how to break
4) Engineers who don't know how to avoid stepping on patented parts of elliptic curve cryptography implementations.
5) Obsolete operating systems that don't understand ECC certs
6) Anything else I haven't thought of
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Most of the time when you hear that it takes "thousands of years" to factor a prime number
Really? I can factor most primes in my head.. Semiprimes would be a different story...