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I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

mcpherrin.ca

21–30 of 131 posts

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#21
post #10

> While I haven’t verified this LLM output is entirely trustworthy, it looks pretty plausible. It's essential that you do, because generating pretty plausible outputs is an LLM's bread and butter. Otherwise, only the one that you actually tested should be expected to be correct.

I think you're assuming that the output of the page is LLM generated and not the process to produce the page.

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#22
post #11

A bit unfortunate that so many of the interesting bits were left to ai. I would've enjoyed some commentary on why the custom TLS implementation was necessary. Oh well. Update: found this explanation in a comment at the top of the (surprisingly short) Go file in the linked repo: The target client is Netscape Communicator 4.51 (both the 40-bit export build and the 128-bit US build) with its clock set to the year 2000.…

A while back I helped a friend (read: dumped a bunch of compute power into it) brute force the SSL keys for Sega's "Phantasy Star Online" Dreamcast game. They used a similar kind of custom (and flawed) TLS implementation in their game(s) which allowed signing new certificates after brute forcing. The benefit to this is that users can now play these games without needing to burn a new CD with either the SSL certs swap…

For what it's worth, this comment was better than the article...

When you outsource to the slop machine, you don't have anything interesting to say (usually).

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#23
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while back I helped a friend (read: dumped a bunch of compute power into it) brute force the SSL keys for Sega's "Phantasy Star Online" Dreamcast game. They used a similar kind of custom (and flawed) TLS implementation in their game(s) which allowed signing new certificates after brute forcing. The benefit to this is that users can now play these games without needing to burn a new CD with either the SSL certs swap…

For what it's worth, this comment was better than the article... When you outsource to the slop machine, you don't have anything interesting to say (usually).

Oh, I have *strong* opinions about the slop machine. But I try to temper them so I don't get buried by the usual "pro AI" mob

I will say that my projects have a "leading the pack" anti-AI policy [1]

[1] https://wiki.cursedsilicon.net/wiki/AI_Policy

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#26
post #4

Basically 2 days on a consumer GPU to crack a 512 bit cert. The thing is much of the traffic back then did not use ephemeral keys. Most of it wasn't even encrypted at all! But about a decade later, it became normal to encrypt everything. I do wonder which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later when decryption can happen.

The linked CADO-NFS Inria page makes no mention of GPUs, and nor does its downloads page, which makes me think that TFA's factoring was done purely on CPUs. If so, there could still be considerable speedup on the table!

The CADO-NFS page gives some benchmark results for 16 threads, suggesting the algorithm parallelises at least somewhat well.

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#27
post #10

> While I haven’t verified this LLM output is entirely trustworthy, it looks pretty plausible. It's essential that you do, because generating pretty plausible outputs is an LLM's bread and butter. Otherwise, only the one that you actually tested should be expected to be correct.

For a problem like this it doesn't matter. The part the LLM generated was a hurdle to clear on the way to the final result. Once the final result was achieved, you know the earlier step was valid enough to get there.

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#28
post #4

Basically 2 days on a consumer GPU to crack a 512 bit cert. The thing is much of the traffic back then did not use ephemeral keys. Most of it wasn't even encrypted at all! But about a decade later, it became normal to encrypt everything. I do wonder which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later when decryption can happen.

It's possible symmetric encryption may never really be defeated by anything other than brute force. The exchange of the ephemeral key really is the important part, as you mention. Thankfully looks like we are getting closer to full adoption of post quantum TLS... but that doesn't help recorded communications before very recently. Scary thought.

Looks like 70% of cloudflare requests are using post-quantum TLS! https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum

Re: I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

#29
post #4

Basically 2 days on a consumer GPU to crack a 512 bit cert. The thing is much of the traffic back then did not use ephemeral keys. Most of it wasn't even encrypted at all! But about a decade later, it became normal to encrypt everything. I do wonder which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later when decryption can happen.

The linked CADO-NFS Inria page makes no mention of GPUs, and nor does its downloads page, which makes me think that TFA's factoring was done purely on CPUs. If so, there could still be considerable speedup on the table! The CADO-NFS page gives some benchmark results for 16 threads, suggesting the algorithm parallelises at least somewhat well.

I didn't use any GPUs, but Steve Weis (who factored the final key at the bottom of the post) did. He's posted about that factoring setup over on https://x.com/sweis/status/2095570645505700165
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