Flaw Crippling Millions of Crypto Keys Is Worse Than First Disclosed (arstechnica.com) 76
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.
Re:Organizations known to use keys vulnerable to R (Score:5, Informative)
List please? Or is this going to be another one of those things?
Well, according to the authors' preprint version of the actual paper [fi.muni.cz], 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 [fi.muni.cz].
Re:Organizations known to use keys vulnerable to R (Score:5, Informative)
What you can do is submit your public key to an online checker, like https://keytester.cryptosense.... [cryptosense.com] and see if it's vulnerable.
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Estonia has online voting using these ids. It's also been heavily cyber and social attacked by neighboring Russia. So the democracy is at risk as long as they continue to allow online voting using ids with unknown flaws:
estoniavoting link [estoniaevoting.org]
"Estonia is the only country in the world that relies on Internet voting in a significant way for national elections. The system is currently used for Estonia’s national parliamentary elections, municipal elections and is planned to be used for the May 2014 European
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Online voting in Estonia is inherently more secure than paper ballots, which are much easier to manipulate.
Furthermore, this form of voting is a lot unlike this black-box electronic voting sham in the U.S., which has outdated and vulnerable machines with old operating systems spread around far and wide. In many respects, Estonia has electronic voting done right.
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As much as I welcome Estonia's leading role in the development of democratic governance, your claim is unfortunately very, very untrue. We know that it's possible to store persistent viruses in the firmware of hard drives, let alone the possible exploits of UEFI, and the Intel ME and AMD PSP. Online voting systems are much easier to tamper on a massive scale than paper ballots, because of a lack of reliable endpoint security. All PCs are insecure, whether used with card readers or not.
Re:Organizations known to use keys vulnerable to R (Score:4, Informative)
All PCs are insecure, whether used with card readers or not.
That's why in Estonia you can double-check via a physically independent channel (smartphone app) that your vote reached the server correctly. Worked fine for me at the recent elections.
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If the servers get compromised then it's game over. That's the same with paper ballots, if the central office is corrupt then there is no trust in the results. It is true that there needs to be some trust in the state officials; electronic voting would probably not work in some other countries where 146% voter turnout or 99% single party wins are common. But that's not the problem with paper or technology, it's the problem with the state.
For detecting that there is something fishy happening you don't nee
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Online voting in Estonia is inherently more secure than paper ballots, which are much easier to manipulate.
...
WUT?!?!?
"It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes." - Josef Stalin
Get control of the counting software and you control the country, with no evidence to the contrary.
At least with paper ballots, the ballots themselves exist.
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Russian bot?
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Interesting. The story states that PGP may be vulnerable, but when I put my (known good) public gpg key into the crypto sense tester it says "Sorry, this doesn't look like a valid or supported key".
So it would seem either the story is incorrect in claiming PGP keys are vulnerable, or else the tester is badly written.
Software designed for this specific hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
From my understanding, the error was made by a hardware vendor who makes an encryption chip, and is present in the specialized library used with their chip. It can be loaded from software, but it's not what I'd call a "software implementation", the software is just an interface to this one vendor's hardware chip.
The list of products using this hardware chip is quite long, and I haven't seen a comprehensive list published. We can say that it's hardware-based systems, smartcards and the like, that are affected.
Of course it's also possible that developers of some pure software systems independently made the same error, separately from the reported flaw.
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encryption is overrated (Score:1)
https://www.xkcd.com/538/ [xkcd.com]
Effected Vendors? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know Yubikeys were recalled for this; if you have an effected key they'll ship you a new one for free. The old ones are fine, just so long as you don't use the internal key generator hardware EVER AGAIN. I plan on putting a red dot on mine with nail polish, and retiring them to emitting static passwords for my online games.
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"The issue weakens the strength of on-chip RSA key generation and affects some use cases for the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) smart card and OpenPGP functionality of the YubiKey 4 platform. Other functions of the YubiKey 4, including PIV Smart Cards with ECC keys, FIDO U2F, Yubico OTP, and OATH functions, are not affected. YubiKey NEO and FIDO U2F Security Key are not impacted."
Quoted from Yubico's security advisory. I think you're over reacting if you're thinking of, "retiring them to emitting stat
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It ain't exactly rocket surgery over here, and we're not the soft targets one hopes to avoid being, so.
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Effected Vendors? Do you mean the vendors that are doing something about this?
Effected key? Do you mean a key that is doing something?
If that's what you mean, then your post makes no sense. If it's not what you mean then you're using the wrong word. Try this one instead: Affected.
http://www.businessdictionary.com/article/967/affected-vs-effected-d1113/
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No. He's right. There's no fucking excuse for a grown ass adult to not know the difference between "affect" and "effect." It's laziness and willful ignorance.
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Doesn't affect U2F, which is good because I leaned on U2F in my campaign and "the primary manufacture of X screwed it up somehow" creates annoyance. Conceptually, I designed my approach to handle this kind of thing: it's not a government-issue token, you can replace it with something else, and the whole thing is regulation-driven and should be based on NIST publications of what's latest-recommendation; politically, people like inflating flaws.
Even if it did affect U2F, as you say, you can replace it wi
Online voting in Estonia (Score:4, Informative)
Estonia has online voting using these ids. It's also been heavily cyber and social attacked by neighboring Russia. So the democracy is at risk as long as they continue to allow online voting using ids with unknown flaws:
https://estoniaevoting.org/press-release/
"Estonia is the only country in the world that relies on Internet voting in a significant way for national elections. The system is currently used for Estonia’s national parliamentary elections, municipal elections and is planned to be used for the May 2014 European Parliamentary elections. In recent polls, 20-25% of voters cast their ballots online."
"In one [simulated by security experts critical of the system] attack, malware on the voter’s computer silently steals votes, despite the systems’ use of secure national ID cards and smartphone verification. A second kind of attack smuggles vote-stealing software into the tabulation server that produces the final official count. The team produced videos in which they carry out exactly the same configuration steps as election officials — but with the system under attack by a simulated state-level adversary. Everything appears normal, but the final count produces a dishonest result."
The big wake up call for them was a cyber attack by Russia in 2007:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia
BTW, Trump has ignored the deadline to impose sanctions against Russia for its cyber attack, and simply hasn't implemented them.
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Russia also kicked my dog.
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Count yourself lucky. The Chinese would have eaten it!
Re:Online voting in Estonia (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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So Hillary was really selling US uranium to the NSA?
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That may be one and the same person but it's also possible that someone does that to troll the original poster (PopeRatzo?), and/or to collect karma for nefarious purposes.
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There's absolutely no way to accurately measure whether it's happening or not.
So obviously, any solution to ensure there's a way to accurately measure it is "a racist dogwhistle."
If you say anything else on the matter, you're a racist too. Wait, people might think I'm racist as well, since we share a similar name. Please shut up.
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4M+ illegal voters on 11/8/16.
(In a very tired voice)
Evidence, please?
Re: National ID cards used for voting? (Score:2)
And he world is _flat_, damnit!
Dan Bernstein... that guy again... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Did he come up with the headlines? (Score:1)
I got the link first through some other venue so I did read it, and he clearly states right up front what he's done, that his work was not independent, and so on. So the meat of the matter was not dishonest.
I took it as was described, as an exercise in seeing what he could come up with given the few hints the original researchers let drop, which is quite a bit, in fact. That datum is interesting (if to me not surprising), when taken as such. The breathless headline and non-story from the "copy/paste-press"
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When I read the summary, I didn't understand the importance of a 25% improvement. It seemed trivial. Going from impossible to 25 minutes is big. Going from 25 minutes to 18 minutes is minor.
If I'm (speed) reading the postings correctly, (BIG caveat) ...
what he did was:
* Look at the open postings, which didn't reveal the details of the attack or publish its code.
* Figure out (from this and his crypto-related math knowledge) enough to, independently, come up with both a variant attack (that ra