RSA Warns Developers Not To Use RSA Products

rroman writes "RSA has recommended developers not to use Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator (RNG), which has been known to be weak and slow since 2006. The funny thing is, that even though this has been known for so long, it is the default RNG in BSafe cryptographic toolkit, which is product of RSA."

Doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely no-one in their right mind is still using crypto software from US companies? None of it can be trusted any more.

No point pussy-footing around

[innocent_white_lamb]

There's no point in pussy-footing around this. It's obvious that RSA was either forced or "rewarded" into using an insecure method. And that they knew it at the time (because they are cryptographers and because they don't live in the bottom of a well.)

Therefore, RSA has proven themselves untrustworthy at best, corrupt at worst, and quite likely both.

The question is what to do next? Rip out everything RSA in all infrastructure and replace it with something that works appears to be the best approach, but how should that be done and what should it be replaced with? And, most importantly, how can we verify that replacement?

Re:The obligatory NSA question

[gweihir]

The problem is that RSA made the worst generator (in every respect) of several the default. That cannot have been an engineering decision or a business decision in the interest of their customers. It is dead certain that NSA coercion is behind it, anybody that can build a working crypto library cannot be that incompetent.

Re:The obligatory NSA question

[Solandri]

Up to a month ago such a comment would've been modded to -1 because historically, NSA had helped improve [schneier.com] the security of encryption standards. As Schneier has said, the revelations about recent NSA activity has completely evaporated the goodwill NSA earned in the cryptographic community from back then.

Re:The obligatory NSA question

[jthill]

It wasn't RSA. They trusted the NSA, with good reason. The NSA had earned the trust of just about everybody in the community by improving DES with changes nobody understood until fifteen years later.

Then someone figured out that the way this new RNG is set up, the constants the NSA chose *could be* the public half of an asymmetric key, and if so the RNG's state could be read with very little effort by anyone in possession of the private half. There is no mathematical way at all to tell whether this is the case, but apparently something in the Snowden documents at least strongly suggests the NSA did know about it and did use it.

It's important to highlight that this isn't the kind of weakness anyone _else_ can take advantage of; a blackhat would still have to discover their private key, the exact same problem he was facing before. The NSA are apparently not dumb enough to rely on keeping math a secret.

But it seems every successful security service forgets the basic lesson: set up a system with unchecked power, the scum of the earth will eventually take notice. From that moment they'll dedicate their lives to getting control of it. They'll eventually succeed.. Snowden took advantage of criminally slack security in the NSA. Just the the fact that he could reveal the documents he revealed is proof the NSA have already gotten arrogant and sloppy, never mind what's in them.