How 1990s Encryption Backdoors Put Today's Internet In Jeopardy

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 20, 2015 @10:17AM from the grunge-net dept.

An anonymous reader writes: While debate swirls in Washington D.C. about new encryption laws, the consequences of the last crypto war is still being felt. Logjam vulnerabilities making headlines today is "a direct result of weakening cryptography legislation in the 1990s," researcher J. Alex Halderman said. "Thanks to Moore's law and improvements in cryptanalysis, the ability to break that crypto is something really anyone can do with open-source software. The backdoor might have seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe the arguments 20 years ago convinced people this was going to be safe. History has shown otherwise. This is the second time in two months we've seen 90s era crypto blow up and put the safety of everyone on the internet in jeopardy."

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Y2K problem resurfaces and will again by dbIII · 2015-05-20 17:25 · Score: 3, Informative

In 2008 the Macromedia flexlm program (an annoying thing with the role of sporadically preventing you from using the software you have actually paid for - thus punishing people who didn't pirate it) had a bug where permanent licences, given a date of "00", were mapped onto the date of 1st January 2000 and thus had expired. Annoying. Even more annoying was the "expert" I dealt with on the issue said "what's a Y2K bug?".
Such stupidity took a full two weeks to fix.