Cryptography Expert Sounds Alarm At Possible Math Hack

netbuzz writes "First we learn from Bruce Schneier that the NSA may have left itself a secret back door in an officially sanctioned cryptographic random-number generator. Now Adi Shamir is warning that a math error unknown to a chip makers but discovered by a tech-savvy terrorist could lead to serious consequences, too. Remember the Intel blunder of 1996? 'Mr. Shamir wrote that if an intelligence organization discovered a math error in a widely used chip, then security software on a PC with that chip could be "trivially broken with a single chosen message." Executing the attack would require only knowledge of the math flaw and the ability to send a "poisoned" encrypted message to a protected computer, he wrote. It would then be possible to compute the value of the secret key used by the targeted system.'"

So..

[yoblin]

Hey! What if terrorists were to discover TIME TRAVEL and went back to prevent us from getting our independence from England! I think I'll hold off on worrying about math-genius terrorists figuring out bugs in encryption hardware until there's some actual evidence of it, thank you.

Re:National Safety Administration?

[ScrewMaster]

Who are the "National Safety Administration"?

They're the sister outfit to the "National Highway Traffic Security Administration".

Re:how many encryption schemes us floating point?

[Ann Coulter]

Maybe the FPU shares circuitry with the integer instruction circuitry.

Re:First Post?

[piojo]

You wrote a bunch of counterexamples to show that the poster was wrong, and that his statement really just meant, "everyone that doesn't agree with me is an idiot." And then you called him an idiot. Good job.

Re:First Post?

[ozmanjusri]

A little over a trillion dollars, so far.

Re:Pentium FDIV Bug

[The New Andy]

Don't you mean 1994?

Don't you mean 1993.9999999999987

Re:WTF "terrorist"

[Anonymous Coward]

...more in line with a government agency, rather than a "terrorist" group?

You speak as if the two are mutually exclusive...