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

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."

Comments

Logjam

[phantomfive]

AFAICT it doesn't put 'the internet' in jeopardy, reports are only a small percentage of websites are even vulnerable to this (link).

Here's the weird thing about this to me (in bullet points):
* A couple years ago, the only people who cared about vulns were people who knew how to use metasploit or ethereal or something.
* Last year, with Heartbleed, the news organization found out it could generate page views if the vulnerability had a pretty logo.
* Now with this story, the non-techy articles are so numerous it's hard to figure out what the actual exploit even is. But if you want to find an 'personal interest' story blaming Bush or Clinton (or whatever president), they're all over the place.

I wonder what will happen if the mainstream media learns to read Apple's or Microsoft's security bulletins and finds out how common security exploits actually are......