Slashdot Mirror
Flaw Crippling Millions of Crypto Keys Is Worse Than First Disclosed (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A crippling flaw affecting millions -- and possibly hundreds of millions -- of encryption keys used in some of the highest-stakes security settings is considerably easier to exploit than originally reported, cryptographers declared over the weekend. The assessment came as Estonia abruptly suspended 760,000 national ID cards used for voting, filing taxes, and encrypting sensitive documents. The critical 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. When researchers first disclosed the flaw three weeks ago, they estimated it would cost an attacker renting time on a commercial cloud service an average of $38 and 25 minutes to break a vulnerable 1024-bit key and $20,000 and nine days for a 2048-bit key. Organizations known to use keys vulnerable to ROCA—named for the Return of the Coppersmith Attack the factorization method is based on—have largely downplayed the severity of the weakness.
On Sunday, researchers Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange reported they developed an attack that was 25 percent more efficient than the one created by original ROCA researchers. The new attack was solely the result of Bernstein and Lange based only on the public disclosure information from October 16, which at the time omitted specifics of the factorization attack in an attempt to increase the time hackers would need to carry out real-world attacks. After creating their more efficient attack, they submitted it to the original researchers. The release last week of the original attack may help to improve attacks further and to stoke additional improvements from other researchers as well.
On Sunday, researchers Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange reported they developed an attack that was 25 percent more efficient than the one created by original ROCA researchers. The new attack was solely the result of Bernstein and Lange based only on the public disclosure information from October 16, which at the time omitted specifics of the factorization attack in an attempt to increase the time hackers would need to carry out real-world attacks. After creating their more efficient attack, they submitted it to the original researchers. The release last week of the original attack may help to improve attacks further and to stoke additional improvements from other researchers as well.
List please? Or is this going to be another one of those things?
Well, according to the authors' preprint version of the actual paper, there's quite a few software implementations of RSA-based encryption that are vulnerable - PGP among them.
If you'd prefer the authors' summary version, you'll find it here.
Check out my novel.
What you can do is submit your public key to an online checker, like https://keytester.cryptosense.... and see if it's vulnerable.
John
And all USA military attacks are launched from Russian soil, that's how USA invaded Ukraine and Georgia secretly without anyone noticing! All they had to do was sneak onto Russian soil first!
And NSA wanted Trump in power, which is why they cyber attacked their own election to selectively release emails on his competitors. The devils!
NSA is soooo cunning, they even hired dodgy Russian businessmen to buy up Trump condos shortly after the property crash, using Russian cash laundered through Cyprus, giving his buildings a fake inflated value that he could over-leverage against and keep his ponzi property empire afloat. Just so two election cycles later it could pretend he was heavily indebted to his Russian friends!
Damn cunning NSA, always blaming sweet sweet innocent Putin for everything.
Full disclosure: I am in the academic crypto community, I have met Dan Bernstein and Tanja Lange countless times at seminars, conferences, etc. Posting as AC for obvious reasons.
Just to put it into perspective for the readers who don't know: Dan and Tanja are longtime partners, they have most of their work done together. Tanja is cool. Dan Bernstein, however, is totally not. He is smart, but not *that* smart, not as much as he wants people to believe anyway. And that's totally fine, at the end you have to do your best to advertise yourself and sell your expertise, everybody does it, and Dan is not one of the worst ones in this respect.
What I can't stand about this guy though is the aggressive, obsessive, and self-glorifying way he uses when discussing any possible little thing. Like, he needs to show you that he's ALWAYS right, that he's THE BEST on every possible discussion topics. You can clearly see that this poor guy was bullied hardcore as a child, and now he feels like he has to compensate his insecurities through this aggressive behavior.
Typical thing he does, as this slashdot story shows, is taking credit for any big crypto-related breakthrough, even if it does not originally come from himself. Some researcher with less PR skills than Dan come up with a clever attack that makes it into the news? Dan comes up with a *minor* improvement on that work, downplaying the importance of the first attack, and hitting all the tech news websites with glorifying headlines. Like in the case of this slashdot story. Or like when, after Marc Steven's collision attack on SHA-1, he made some minor improvements and changed his twitter handle to @hashbreaker (that was ridiculous, and I really liked Marc's response of changing his handle to @realhashbreaker lol! Dan is indeed, in a certain sense, the academic equivalent of The Donald).
There are many other examples of Dan's claiming expertise he dose not have and bashing other researchers on topic he's not an expert of. Just have a look at the IACR (almost unused) forum, or GoogleGroups related to lattice-based crypto, or Twitter, and much more. In any case, he'd NEVER admit he was wrong.
I do not comment on his involvement in the Jacob Applebaum case, because I'm not really informed, and I'm not a vigilante.
Seriously Dan, if you're reading this: take a hint! You're fine, really, you don't have to behave like this. This is not just my opinion, mind you, I have talked with many and many crypto people who think the same, and they just don't tell you because they do not want to be involved in pointless discussions with you. Can you please be nicer to people? I'm sure your career would also benefit from it.