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Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists

arstechnica.com

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Re: Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists

#71

Post by scott_s »

bcrescimanno wrote: post #24
kposehn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was basically my thinking. The purpose of Flame seems to be clear intelligence gathering, so most likely it is a state actor that wanted it; I wonder however if it was indeed developed by a state or a private group on behalf of a state. Plausible deniability is useful after all.

Absolutely. I have very little doubt that it was indeed a nation-state who developed it; but, my main issue is with the distinction of it being a "wealthy" one. Couldn't Flame, perhaps, have been developed by Iran and released on themselves as a means for drumming up anti-Israeli or anti-American sentiment? I realize something like that is totally conjecture; but, I don't see it as any further conjecture than, "it mu…

It depends on how one defines "wealthy." The IMF has Iran at 25th out of 182 wealthiest in the world, World Bank has them at 29 out of 190, and the CIA has them at 25 out of 191 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin... ). I think they're using "wealthy" to mean "wealthy enough for the government to fund non-trivial computer science research."

Re: Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists

#72

Post by 0x0 »

marshray wrote: post #67
0x0 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see; on Vista and above, certain fields in the certificate prevent it from being accepted for code signature. So they did a collision attack to create a slightly twisted certificate where all those fields are tucked away in a useless segment and ignored. Are there any details on what's new with this particular attack, compared to the known previously published ones? Why wouldn't earlier public research (such as tha…

I believe the phrase you're searching for is "awesome applied crypto research." :-) http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/ We don't yet have details on the differences. I've looked at the evil colliding cert and, AFAICT, the "MD5 Considered Harmful" technique would probably have been sufficient to pull this off.

Thanks for the clarification.

The rogue-ca thing is awesome indeed! :)

Re: Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists

#73

Post by batista »

keithpeter wrote: post #50
batista wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, if I had the capability to screw up Iran's nuclear program in my spare time I probably would, because, y'know, fuck Iran. Fuck Iran why exactly? Because toppling their democratically elected government and establishing a puppet in the fifties wasn't enough? Or arming Saddam's Iraq to fight them in the eighties? Or maybe because, say, TX can execute 15 year old "criminals" and ban abortion and/or gay marriag…

I understand your position here, but, please make contact with some Iranian refugees/dissidents near you for the full picture. Its bad. Worse than I understand Texas to be, by several ball parks.

>I understand your position here, but, please make contact with some Iranian refugees/dissidents near you for the full picture. Its bad. Worse than I understand Texas to be, by several ball parks.

Sure, but those are "refugees/dissidents", of course they would think that. It's not like the great Iranian masses are held there by force or hate their culture.

In general, dissidents are also overplayed for political gain by other countries. I mean, even the USSR played upon US political dissidents, the McCarthy era etc. If you are going to judge a whole country better ask the locals, not the dissidents.

Re: Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists

#74

Post by batista »

shock-value wrote: post #55
batista wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, if I had the capability to screw up Iran's nuclear program in my spare time I probably would, because, y'know, fuck Iran. Fuck Iran why exactly? Because toppling their democratically elected government and establishing a puppet in the fifties wasn't enough? Or arming Saddam's Iraq to fight them in the eighties? Or maybe because, say, TX can execute 15 year old "criminals" and ban abortion and/or gay marriag…

planetguy is probably referring to the _government_ of Iran, which hardly pays much heed to its citizens' decisions about "how they want to live".

We like to separate the citizens and the government, but I don't think this is the case. For most of the citizens, loyal muslims etc, that's exactly how they want to live.

Western media just overplays dissidents and people that talk to our "sentiments". Insignificant opposition parties and small protests are elevated to the level of mass popular protest.

If the situation was reversed, imagine what other countries would say of the 2000 US Bush-Gore elections, what with the electoral fraud et al, or things like the Vietnam protests, etc.

Re: Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists

#75

Post by rdl »

batista wrote: post #43
TeMPOraL wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And submarines and cell phone networks are pretty standard technologies, well understood,... But what about, well, drugs? Don't drug cartels employ chemists to refine old drugs and develop "better" ones?

Well understood also. It's not like they're doing cutting edge pharmaceutical drug research that takes mega scientists and billions in funding and very precise enzyme targeting, etc. They mostly iterate on known drugs to make their making cheaper / more addictive. And they can easily test on junkies (I presume).

The "research chemical" community, out of China, SE Asia, Israel, and Europe, is pretty much doing cutting edge pharmaceutical drug research -- the point being to produce "interesting" club drugs while staying ahead of regulation. Not spending billions, but doing fairly reasonable drug discovery, synthesis, and testing.

Of course, sometimes they get it wrong, and you end up with face flesh eating humans in Florida.

Re: Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists

#76

Post by run4yourlives »

ajross wrote: post #66
fleitz wrote: post #19

Hmm... if only there was some sort of National Security Agency that employed cryptographers so we'd know about these things first and could protect us from these attacks.

Clearly posters aren't getting the sarcasm, so I'll spell it out: the NSA is clearly suspect number one. What's more interesting to me, though, isn't that they had this technique, it's that they let it out for ... what? It seems like this is a garden variety public worm. One would think that if the NSA had the ability to forge windows code signatures like this, they would have used it more selectively. Some spook is…

I think it's naive to assume there wasn't a clear, valuable target in mind that warranted its release.

After all, it's been in the wild since at least 2010. The entire Arab Spring has happened since then.

Re: Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists

#77

Post by Achshar »

I think it makes sense that a well funded government was behind flame, but it makes me wonder, there is nothing that explicitly calls for huge funding. Nothing is very costly other than talent. So just a hypothetical situation here but why can't a hypothetical real life Tony Stark make it? (not rich like Stark but intelligent like Stark) Just a one or two people in a garage on their PC. What makes it impossible for that to be the case?

Re: Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists

#78

Post by ertdfgcb »

Achshar wrote: post #77

I think it makes sense that a well funded government was behind flame, but it makes me wonder, there is nothing that explicitly calls for huge funding. Nothing is very costly other than talent. So just a hypothetical situation here but why can't a hypothetical real life Tony Stark make it? (not rich like Stark but intelligent like Stark) Just a one or two people in a garage on their PC. What makes it impossible for t…

Time? But besides that, I can't really think of anything. Some guy on NPR was talking about how it might be some professional developers who did this in their free time, so that would kind of make sense.

Re: Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists

#79

Post by dfc »

batista wrote: post #33
planetguy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would one smart, determined person, working in his spare time and for his own satisfaction, be capable of doing it? I mean, if I had the capability to screw up Iran's nuclear program in my spare time I probably would, because, y'know, fuck Iran.

> I mean, if I had the capability to screw up Iran's nuclear program in my spare time I probably would, because, y'know, fuck Iran. Fuck Iran why exactly? Because toppling their democratically elected government and establishing a puppet in the fifties wasn't enough? Or arming Saddam's Iraq to fight them in the eighties? Or maybe because, say, TX can execute 15 year old "criminals" and ban abortion and/or gay marriag…

I take it that you are not checking HN from a internet cafe in Tel Aviv?
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