11–20 of 433 posts
Could someone help me understand why we're not dramatically ramping up key sizes across the board on all encryption? Not as a solution, but as a buy-some-time measure. Compute is rapidly increasing, there is continuous chatter about quantum and yet everyone seems to be just staring at their belly buttons. Obviously bigger keys are more expensive in compute, but we've got more too...why only use it on the cracking sid…
How common are such small DKIM keys? I'm pretty sure mine are 2048-bit, though I'd have to check as they were last set a fair while ago.
> In our study on the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records of the top 1M websites, we were surprised to uncover more than 1,700 public DKIM keys that were shorter than 1,024 bits in length
Technically, this is very nice work. But as a security generality - email is vastly less secure* than human nature wants to assume that it is. Human nature usually wins. *Outside of a carefully run org's own network, and a few other edge cases
Yeah, so I guess there's no point in picking any of the low hanging fruit to make it more secure.
For instance, once you disregard so called transactional mail and spam, real email is almost all encrypted for all practical purposes.
DKIM and DMARC also work quite well for spoofing protection, aside from the corner cases like the above.
Average Software Engineers have an outdated idea of email, formed by 1990 era Internet.
How common are such small DKIM keys? I'm pretty sure mine are 2048-bit, though I'd have to check as they were last set a fair while ago.
First sentence: > In our study on the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records of the top 1M websites, we were surprised to uncover more than 1,700 public DKIM keys that were shorter than 1,024 bits in length
How common are such small DKIM keys? I'm pretty sure mine are 2048-bit, though I'd have to check as they were last set a fair while ago.
Could someone help me understand why we're not dramatically ramping up key sizes across the board on all encryption? Not as a solution, but as a buy-some-time measure. Compute is rapidly increasing, there is continuous chatter about quantum and yet everyone seems to be just staring at their belly buttons. Obviously bigger keys are more expensive in compute, but we've got more too...why only use it on the cracking sid…
That’s the reason, it breaks things, and some of them are important and can’t simply be updated.
Could someone help me understand why we're not dramatically ramping up key sizes across the board on all encryption? Not as a solution, but as a buy-some-time measure. Compute is rapidly increasing, there is continuous chatter about quantum and yet everyone seems to be just staring at their belly buttons. Obviously bigger keys are more expensive in compute, but we've got more too...why only use it on the cracking sid…
In the context of DKIM we're waiting for Ed25519 to reach major adoption, which will solve a lot of annoyances for everyone.
Could someone help me understand why we're not dramatically ramping up key sizes across the board on all encryption? Not as a solution, but as a buy-some-time measure. Compute is rapidly increasing, there is continuous chatter about quantum and yet everyone seems to be just staring at their belly buttons. Obviously bigger keys are more expensive in compute, but we've got more too...why only use it on the cracking sid…
If and when anything quantum is able to yield results (I wouldn’t worry much about this), increasing key size is pretty much meaningless, you need to move to other encryption schemes (there’s lots of options already).
Technically, this is very nice work. But as a security generality - email is vastly less secure* than human nature wants to assume that it is. Human nature usually wins. *Outside of a carefully run org's own network, and a few other edge cases
Yeah, so I guess there's no point in picking any of the low hanging fruit to make it more secure.
If you're in IT at a carefully run org: You ditched 512-bit keys years ago. This article is nothing but a 20-second story, to help explain to PHB's and noobs why they got an error message, or what sorta important stuff you're always busy keeping your org safe from.
If you're in IT at a scraping-by org: Maybe today's a good day to ditch 512-bit keys. And if you get push-back...gosh, here's a how-to article, showing how a "forged corporate signature stamp" can be made for only $8.
If you're trying to teach senior citizen how to avoid being scammed on the internet: You've got zero visibility or control, so you're stuck with "sometimes these can be forged, depending on technical details" generalities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First sentence: > In our study on the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records of the top 1M websites, we were surprised to uncover more than 1,700 public DKIM keys that were shorter than 1,024 bits in length
So 1,700 out of 1,000,000, i.e. around 0.2%. "Not common" is one way of putting it, I guess.
Yahoo Mail has a market share on the order of 3%. So a black hat could then target a decent chunk of users with @yahoo addresses specifically.
Has anyone heard of this being exploited in the wild? Would be interesting to find out whether there are some reputable domains among the 1.7k vulnerable ones.