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Millions of High-Security Crypto Keys Crippled by Newly Discovered Flaw (arstechnica.com)
Slovak and Czech researchers have found a vulnerability that leaves government and corporate encryption cards vulnerable to hackers to impersonate key owners, inject malicious code into digitally signed software, and decrypt sensitive data, reports ArsTechnica. From the report: The weakness allows attackers to calculate the private portion of any vulnerable key using nothing more than the corresponding public portion. Hackers can then use the private key to impersonate key owners, decrypt sensitive data, sneak malicious code into digitally signed software, and bypass protections that prevent accessing or tampering with stolen PCs. The five-year-old flaw is also troubling because it's located in code that complies with two internationally recognized security certification standards that are binding on many governments, contractors, and companies around the world. The code library was developed by German chipmaker Infineon and has been generating weak keys since 2012 at the latest. The flaw is the one Estonia's government obliquely referred to last month when it warned that 750,000 digital IDs issued since 2014 were vulnerable to attack. Estonian officials said they were closing the ID card public key database to prevent abuse. On Monday, officials posted this update. Last week, Microsoft, Google, and Infineon all warned how the weakness can impair the protections built into TPM products that ironically enough are designed to give an additional measure of security to high-targeted individuals and organizations.
Would using the Rust programming language have helped avoid this flaw?
Can we combine all these articles under just one title "Your Security is Flawed. You're Not Secure"?
Sent from my TARDIS
If you use a Yubikey or other smart card for key generation, revoke them and generate new keys using OpenSSL. Any system relying on TPM 1.4 is also suspect. This flaw affects keys generated using Infineon smartcards. Currently 1024 bit keys are trivially broken and 2048 bit keys are broken but could cost tens of thousands of dollars in compute to crack. 3072 and 4096 bit keys are still quite safe but if regeneration is practical then you should still do it. The attack could always improve and reach them.
I'm having trouble finding the specific details. It looks like they aren't releasing all the details publicly until a conference on November 2nd https://crocs.fi.muni.cz/public/papers/rsa_ccs17 but it appears to be a problem only with RSA keys they generate and has to do with how they are generating large primes, not a fundamental flaw in RSA. This has happened before with some implementations. For example, some early RSA implementations (and occasionally some ones still today made by people who have no business programming them) would chose primes in the following way: Pick a random big odd number and check if it is prime, and if so use it. If not, add 2 and check again, keep going until you have a prime. The problem with this method is that some primes end up being much more likely to be selected than others. For example, if you are picking two digit primes then the only way this way to pick 109 is if one picked 109 on the nose, but 127 becomes much more likely to be picked because if your initial number is 121,123,125 or 127 then it gets picked. It seems like some much more subtle variant of something like this is at fault.
Next up, curve 25519 and millions of apple fan boys crying into their caramel latte.
If that happens, it won't just be Apple fan boys who are put out.
In any case, it doesn't take a math genius to predict something like this would happen with factorization. There was no breakthrough on the fundamental problem, only a discovery of a weak key choice algorithm. This is where nearly every exploit in the world comes from: not from advances in mathematics, but the discovery of sloppy implementations.
The problem with software is that it is almost irresistibly considered finished when it looks right.
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