31–40 of 81 posts
It irks me that many people are calling this a backdoor. It's not. It's a vulnerability. You have to exploit it to get in.
An intentionally introduced vulnerability can be considered a backdoor, even if it's not a matter of saying "open sesame" to open the so-called backdoor.
Hasn't tptacek posted "nothing to see here" regarding this issue on HN a half dozen times because "nobody uses it"? :)
Hasn't tptacek posted "nothing to see here" regarding this issue on HN a half dozen times because "nobody uses it"? :)
It irks me that many people are calling this a backdoor. It's not. It's a vulnerability. You have to exploit it to get in.
Serious question: what's the difference? I would have followed the definition for backdoor since it relies on particular secret information relating P and Q that the NSA might have—but where should one draw the line between backdoors and vulnerabilities? Intent?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a PRNG based on a trapdoor function where apparently the NSA has the key. With that key they can recover the RNG state from just a small amount of it. Thats a backdoor by most descriptions. This isn't just a bug.
Snowden obviously has that key as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially the part about KDFs being deliberately slow, and according to him that somehow implies that RNGs should also be slow. Whut? This guy is really a CTO?
"The length of time that Dual_EC_DRBG takes can be seen as a virtue: it also slows down an attacker trying to guess the seed." If a system's seed is weak, one attack is to try all likely seeds, run them through the PRNG to generate keys, and see if any of the keys work. A slow PRNG indeed slows down this process. For instance, it would have slowed down the attack on the Taiwan Cryptocards, which exploited patterns in…
It irks me that many people are calling this a backdoor. It's not. It's a vulnerability. You have to exploit it to get in.
Hasn't tptacek posted "nothing to see here" regarding this issue on HN a half dozen times because "nobody uses it"? :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially the part about KDFs being deliberately slow, and according to him that somehow implies that RNGs should also be slow. Whut? This guy is really a CTO?
"The length of time that Dual_EC_DRBG takes can be seen as a virtue: it also slows down an attacker trying to guess the seed." If a system's seed is weak, one attack is to try all likely seeds, run them through the PRNG to generate keys, and see if any of the keys work. A slow PRNG indeed slows down this process. For instance, it would have slowed down the attack on the Taiwan Cryptocards, which exploited patterns in…
They did not need to simulate the operation of the poorly-seeded PRNG that generated them.