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Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

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Re: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

#111

Post by emmelaich »

geofft wrote: post #54
hannob wrote: post #24

Seems some people are playing havoc with key ids. I got a mail earlier today I couldn't decrypt for unclear reasons. Now I understand why: It seems it was encrypted with a copy of my public key that is on the keyserver colliding with the keyid of my real key. Right now there is a revoked copy of my key there: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=hanno%40hboeck&op=inde... What's exactly going on here? Other commentor…

From evil32.com: > I saw that your clone of the strong set is revoked? > Someone downloaded our copy of the strong set and uploaded all of the keys to the SKS keyserver network. :( While we took on this project to help prompt GPG to build a more secure ecosystem, this mass clone made the keyservers harder for everyone to use. Of course anyone could use our tools to regenerate their own strong set clone and do this ag…

Seems it is not merely the strong set.

Mine is not in the strong set and it had a collision uploaded. It has the same upload (creation?) date -- 2014-06-16 as many others.

Re: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

#112

Post by schoen »

jcranmer wrote: post #67
yarvin9 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A similar design is Proquint, which IPFS uses: https://www.npmjs.com/package/proquint Proquint (5 letters per 16 bits) is tighter than Urbit's `@p` (6 letters per 16 bits). The Urbit form was designed for synthetic names and restricts itself to phonemes that sound comfortable and natural to English speakers. (Not to say that English should be the universal language, it's actually a terrible language to make everyone…

If you want to make a more universal phoneme-generator, the basic contours of a nearly-universal [1] phonotactics is as follows: * Strict CV syllable scheme. * Atonal * Consonants distinguished only by voiced/voiceless (Chinese, e.g., doesn't do a voicing distinction, but switching to an aspiration distinction would suffice for them) * 5 vowels: a, e, i, o, u (actual vowel quality may vary; every language that has at…

Doesn't Lojban try to have pretty easy phonotactics or something? They do have consonant clusters, but I thought they did some kind of study and chose their phonemes and some rules on the basis of things that most languages wouldn't find too difficult.

Edit: not suggesting that Lojban's solution is somehow preferable to your advice, just trying to remember what they did about this issue.

Re: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

#113

Post by adrianratnapala »

thomasahle wrote: post #36
avisser wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's asking for a solution with more gestalt impact. Turn the key into a painting or some sort of visualization.

It has to be a visualization in which changing a few pixels make it look significantly different. Otherwise we can still make a 'low distance' brute force attack.

I don't understand.

What you need is a picture that makes the visually salient information tot up to about 160 bits.

That's tough, but since the human visual system is so powerful, it's not hopeless. But we would need real psychologists to help design the art generators, backing the results with experiments.

Re: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

#114

Post by jcranmer »

schoen wrote: post #112
jcranmer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to make a more universal phoneme-generator, the basic contours of a nearly-universal [1] phonotactics is as follows: * Strict CV syllable scheme. * Atonal * Consonants distinguished only by voiced/voiceless (Chinese, e.g., doesn't do a voicing distinction, but switching to an aspiration distinction would suffice for them) * 5 vowels: a, e, i, o, u (actual vowel quality may vary; every language that has at…

Doesn't Lojban try to have pretty easy phonotactics or something? They do have consonant clusters, but I thought they did some kind of study and chose their phonemes and some rules on the basis of things that most languages wouldn't find too difficult. Edit: not suggesting that Lojban's solution is somehow preferable to your advice, just trying to remember what they did about this issue.

Lojban uses the consonants I gave (sans /j/ and /w/, although these are counted as dipthongs instead), plus /f/, /v/, /x/, /ʔ/, /h/, and /r/, as well as /ə/ for a sixth vowel. The syllable scheme seems to be largely C(C)VC(C), with largely only mixed voiced/unvoiced and geminate consonant clusters prohibited. That said, they do allow for "buffer" vowels in pronunciation to aid speakers who have trouble with consonants (and yet they have a /ə/?).

From what I can tell, CV(C) (with the second consonant usually having some restrictions) is fairly widespread. However, in my personal (purely anecdotal) experience, pronouncing foreign consonant clusters or unfamiliar final consonants is much harder than pronouncing unfamiliar initial consonants or vowels, so I'd be slightly wary of letting the final consonant go too unrestricted.

Re: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

#115

Post by ashitlerferad »

voltagex_ wrote: post #104
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #3

I've attended security conferences in the past two years wherein representatives of companies that claim to see 80+ percent of all Internet traffic in their threat intel offerings who were presenting about Android malware reverse engineering used short IDs in their slide deck and business cards. When I mentioned Evil32 to them, they looked at a loss. https://evil32.com If this is news to you, don't feel bad. Many inf…

I'm just some guy, but I've got a stack of cards with my short ID on them - what do I do now? Toss them?

Destroy them carefully and use the opportunity to create new ones with QR codes on them with your full public key (or just the full fingerprint).

Re: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

#116

Post by beojan »

derefr wrote: post #84
aftbit wrote: post #63

Hi, Eric here, co-creator of evil32. I posted a brief note on our site about this, but here's a little more detail. I found an old (local) backup of the private keys and used it to generate revocation certificates for each key. Fortunately, there is no way for anyone else to access or regenerate the private keys for this particular clone of the strong set, and I have been very careful with my copy - it is only availa…

> users who want to email someone discover their key by searching the keyserver for that email, then taking the newest key. This is akin to trust-on-first-use, and opts out completely from the web of trust or any kind of external verification Well, yes? What is the alternative, if I want to email someone who exists only in the form of a pseudonymous online identity?

Deprecate searching keyservers by name or email address, and only allow searching by fingerprint. Still not a complete fix (the source of the fingerprint may have been compromised) but better than before.

Re: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

#117

Post by torrent-of-ions »

_wmd wrote: post #10
wtbob wrote: post #6

I don't know why more folks don't display keys and fingerprints as Base64; it seems to me that "q68RxlopcLEwq+PEeb4+QwBBGIY=" (Linus's real key) and "D2oUZTLYaa7kOPdLYhGqOwBBGIY=" (Linus's fake key) are pretty easilt-distinguishable, and not terribly verbose.

You can do what PGPfone did and encode the fingerprint as a series of dictionary words: Real gregkh: 647F28654894E3BD457199BE38DBBDC8 = style tactful newcomers file gallows adored insist flags athletics Fake gregkh: 497C48CE16B926E93F49630127365DEA = jukebox governor fashionable mahogany prepares gobble surprised martha apostles There's even an Internet standard for this: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1751 , although…

When is it sensible for a human to inspect the fingerprint anyway?

Re: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

#118

Post by Corrado »

derefr wrote: post #84
aftbit wrote: post #63

Hi, Eric here, co-creator of evil32. I posted a brief note on our site about this, but here's a little more detail. I found an old (local) backup of the private keys and used it to generate revocation certificates for each key. Fortunately, there is no way for anyone else to access or regenerate the private keys for this particular clone of the strong set, and I have been very careful with my copy - it is only availa…

> users who want to email someone discover their key by searching the keyserver for that email, then taking the newest key. This is akin to trust-on-first-use, and opts out completely from the web of trust or any kind of external verification Well, yes? What is the alternative, if I want to email someone who exists only in the form of a pseudonymous online identity?

I think Keybase.io is a pretty good solution to the problem of key ownership. You can confirm the identity of anyone's Keybase key by comparing the fingerprint to one listed in any one of several "public" sources: Twitter, Github, Reddit, and even Hacker News.

Also, I have several invites for Keybase is anyone wants one.

Re: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

#119

Post by acdha »

torrent-of-ions wrote: post #117
_wmd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do what PGPfone did and encode the fingerprint as a series of dictionary words: Real gregkh: 647F28654894E3BD457199BE38DBBDC8 = style tactful newcomers file gallows adored insist flags athletics Fake gregkh: 497C48CE16B926E93F49630127365DEA = jukebox governor fashionable mahogany prepares gobble surprised martha apostles There's even an Internet standard for this: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1751 , although…

When is it sensible for a human to inspect the fingerprint anyway?

Other than the business cards people keep mentioning, PGPfone wasn't a typo but rather a voice communications package, where it's very reasonable to think that you might bootstrap a secure conversation by reading someone your key fingerprint over a phone. Prior to the NSA reveal, the threat model I most heard for this was someone doing business in China or Russia where there have perennially been allegations that the intelligence agencies help large businesses, where blocking a passive wiretap is a success.

Re: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

#120

Post by lmm »

Corrado wrote: post #118
derefr wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> users who want to email someone discover their key by searching the keyserver for that email, then taking the newest key. This is akin to trust-on-first-use, and opts out completely from the web of trust or any kind of external verification Well, yes? What is the alternative, if I want to email someone who exists only in the form of a pseudonymous online identity?

I think Keybase.io is a pretty good solution to the problem of key ownership. You can confirm the identity of anyone's Keybase key by comparing the fingerprint to one listed in any one of several "public" sources: Twitter, Github, Reddit, and even Hacker News. Also, I have several invites for Keybase is anyone wants one.

> I think Keybase.io is a pretty good solution to the problem of key ownership. You can confirm the identity of anyone's Keybase key by comparing the fingerprint to one listed in any one of several "public" sources: Twitter, Github, Reddit, and even Hacker News.

Doesn't that undermine the whole decentralized web of trust concept? All those services are operated by US companies - or what if someone simply compromised Keybase itself?

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