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Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)

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Re: Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To protect against bit flips in car fly-by-wire systems, each signal is sent three times with the 2/3 majority making the decision. This happened after the runaway Prius fiasco that may have been caused by a gamma ray. Prior to that incident the fly-by-wire system only sent one signal.

This is really inefficient, two bitflips in the same location will result in a bitflip. For 3x the space surely there's a more resilient scheme that can handle more.

If I recall right this depends on the original message length and 1 bit is a bit of an edge case. If you transfer just 1 bit, you're very space constrained and it's hard to do much. 1 bit to 1 bit has nothing, 1 bit to 2 bits has single-bit error detection, and 1 bit to three bits has single bit error correction (--and 2 bit error detection-- (this isn't right, thinking about it for a second)). After this, the minimum required checksum length growth logarithmically, plus 1 or 2 for detection / correction - and that constant factor makes 1 bit so weird.

Re: Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)

#52
post #3

I wonder what was the design consideration there? If I'd to make a guess, the point of having key in a re-programmable memory (susceptible to such errors) could be that it could be re-programmed later - otherwise it could've been just hardcoded in ROM. Athough if the error was that it was a RAM copy of the key that's got corrupt, this might explain things - no one to reboot the machine around, huh. If re-programmabil…

This was my thought as well, maybe the key was considered sensitive and getting it on the ROM would have exposed it to more people than "necessary"?

Re: Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit flips are quite useful for sorting huge arrays of data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28766154

That's not a proper sort. A sort is not just a function that takes in a list and returns a list that is sorted. The result must also include all of the elements that you had when starting. That property isn't checked by the code you linked.

Someone should calculate how many copies of the array you need (as a function of input data size) to make that sorting strategy work with reasonable assurance that the original data is maintained.

Re: Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)

#54
post #47
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's your error, having a system with important data no actual/realtime backup no second system and no plan to recover from a failed update and no ecc is YOUR error alone. However, intel should have made ecc the standard and not just for 1000$+ Xeons.

>However, intel should have made ecc the standard and not just for 1000$+ Xeons. Agree 100%. IMHO, the choice between "domestic" and "industrial-strength" should not mean choosing between different degrees of risks of failure.

I gather DDR5 will have ECC as standard du to the extreme density of memory that will bitflip a lot more than usual. Yay fo r consumers.

Re: Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)

#55
post #9

From the headline I imagined this was something like "We lost our encryption key for some important data, but the NSA had already cracked or stolen it, so they were able to return it to us"

Same, but in reality it was a far more interesting topic. And surprising to see how long it took them to crack it considering they had a priori information for the key (knowing the new key could only be a few bits from the old key).

Re: Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)

#57
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However, intel should have made ecc the standard and not just for 1000$+ Xeons. Agree 100%. IMHO, the choice between "domestic" and "industrial-strength" should not mean choosing between different degrees of risks of failure.

I gather DDR5 will have ECC as standard du to the extreme density of memory that will bitflip a lot more than usual. Yay fo r consumers.

DDR5 supports on-chip ECC but the extra parity bits we typically associate as "ECC" are still as optional as ever, motherboard manufacturers will still not bother to route those signals anyway, and Intel will still demand you give up overclocking and pay more for Xeon in order to use ECC sticks.

Re: Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)

#58
Considering bit flips were the leading theory for the changed key, I'm surprised it took that long to brute force test for the changed bit(s).

Sure I dont know how long the key length was, I dont know how long the encrypted string was, but surely it wouldnt have taken that long to cycle through a number of flipped bits, or would it?

Re: Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)

#59

Why is traffic from Voyager even encrypted? The results back are public scientific data anyway, right? And it's not like other nations (the only ones with power to transmit that far, back then) would send rogue commands without getting caught.

> it's not like other nations (the only ones with power to transmit that far, back then) would send rogue commands without getting caught.

How would you catch them?

Also, these spacecraft didn't start off outside the solar system. They weren't always so far away that a lone prankster would have trouble sending them messages.

Re: Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)

#60
post #3

I wonder what was the design consideration there? If I'd to make a guess, the point of having key in a re-programmable memory (susceptible to such errors) could be that it could be re-programmed later - otherwise it could've been just hardcoded in ROM. Athough if the error was that it was a RAM copy of the key that's got corrupt, this might explain things - no one to reboot the machine around, huh. If re-programmabil…

Isn’t the use case the ability to change the encryption key in case it’s compromised?
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