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Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

dmarcchecker.app

301–310 of 433 posts

Re: Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

#301
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think here is where the problem isn't purely a technical one anymore. You're right that, from a legal perspective, there is a difference as the burden of proof would now be on someone else. But, if this actually matters or not, depends entirely on the situation. If you're a criminal trying to get away with something then the change in the burden of proof is all you need. If instead you're a politician trying to avo…

If you are a politician trying to get away with something, the public might have an interest in your secure messaging system being bad, but you yourself do not. Secure messaging systems generally take the side of their users, not the public.

Sorry, I'm missing what you're trying to say here, maybe that a politician would be more careful about which message system he's using? I don't think that's necessarily the case.

Anyway, to further add to my point, depending on the context you don't even need to claim that someone stole your password. In the company where I am now , it is custom that, if someone finds out someone else didn't lock their computer, that someone sends an email (from the victim's account) to the whole office saying that the victim is going to bring cake to the office. DKIM is meant to prove that a message comes from an authorized server, but to prove the identity of the sender as well you need something more.

Edit: to be fair, I do get that with DKIM deniability gets harder. But I think that, for the average person, you would gain more in terms of spam and phising protection than what you loose. High profile targets have to take different security measures than the masses anyway.

Re: Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

#302

Breaking a 512-bit key for a good demonstration is very valuable security research, even if it's been done before. It's also legit to call out "Hey, here's a list of folks still using 512 bit, they should move off." ... but for me, actually cracking a real-world in-use key crosses an ethical line that makes me uncomfortable. IANAL but it might even be criminal. Just seems a bit unnecessary.

I don't think there's a way to make it criminal, any more than publishing a vulnerability that got you code execution on their servers could be. Actually exploiting it, of course, would be.

Re: Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

#303
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a politician trying to get away with something, the public might have an interest in your secure messaging system being bad, but you yourself do not. Secure messaging systems generally take the side of their users, not the public.

Sorry, I'm missing what you're trying to say here, maybe that a politician would be more careful about which message system he's using? I don't think that's necessarily the case. Anyway, to further add to my point, depending on the context you don't even need to claim that someone stole your password. In the company where I am now , it is custom that, if someone finds out someone else didn't lock their computer, that…

What I'm saying is that the "crooked politician" use case you're talking about for DKIM is a way in which you're pleased that a messaging system is insecure, because that insecurity works in your favor (because you're not the user; you just want to violate that user's privacy). But no rational user would want that property for themself; they can only lose from it.

Re: Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

#304
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you crack someone's key, they might be well within their rights to pursue a criminal prosecution. If that were true there would be no market for white hat hackers collecting bug bounties. You need to be able to demonstrate cracking the working system for that to be of any use at all. No company will listen to your theoretical bug exploit, but show them that you can actually break their system and they will pay y…

Bug bounties are a form of consent for testing and usually come with prescribed limits. Prescribed or not, actually getting user data tends to be a huge no go. Sometimes it can happen inadvertently, and when that happens it's best to have logs or evidence that can demonstrate you haven't looked at it or copied it beyond the inadvertent disclosure. But to pursue data deliberately crosses a bright line, and is not nece…

What if the private key were accidentally exposed via public API, behind ROT13?

Also, I don't think DKIM is used for encryption, just signatures.

Re: Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is that for spam filtering purposes, you can prove this morning that the email I sent you this morning came from me, because I’m the only person who had the signing key on it. Anyone else could validate that too. But let’s say I publish that signing key tomorrow. Once I do that, you can’t prove I sent today’s mail because anyone could’ve used that published key tomorrow forget the signature.

Ok, so there's a time window where it's possible to prove that you were the sender. And if I use a qualified timestamp service to sign all messages arriving in my inbox, then I can prove that you were the sender indefinitely.

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Re: Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your definition of cracked? Collisions are easy to produce; there's one right on the Wikipedia page.

Collisions are not interesting. Millions of leaked passwords hashed with MD4/MD5 are of very practical interest.

If you use the same password on different sites despite password managers and now passkeys you are asking for it.

Re: Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

#307
post #299

I don't understand why didn't Yahoo fail due to SPF check failure.

Considering that Yahoo doesn't really exist anymore, and that Yahoo Mail is just a relic of Yahoo's heyday that is somehow still hanging around, I assume nobody has bothered to actually maintain its handling of security protocols for about a decade.

"existing" is basically all it does. They make 8B a year and have the 12th most popular website globally.

The email product has gobbled up both AOL and Verizon and they also whitelabel to a bunch of other ISPs. Just because they are never in the news for anything cool and hackernews commenters dont use them doesnt mean they dont exist.

Re: Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

#308
post #104
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

512 extra bits of key only gets you 23 bits of entropy?

Yep, the formula is a bit complicated, it comes from the general number field sieve (GNFS) algorithm, you can find some equivalences online between symmetric key algorithms and RSA and 23 bits seems about right. I have also seen lists where they give RSA-512 64 bits and RSA-1024 80 bits, just a 16 bit difference, but it looks a bit arbitrary to me. I think the NIST doesn't even look at RSA-512 anymore, as it is defin…

> A RSA key is the product of two primes, not any number, so you need a lot more bits to get equivalent security

This explanation doesn't seem right to me. For 1024 bit numbers, about 0.14% are prime. So that difference only loses a handful of bits. There are more than 2^2000 usable RSA-2048 keys, and simply guessing and dividing would require more than 2^1000 guesses. Those few bits lost to the prime number restriction aren't why the level of security is so low.

Re: Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I wasn't aware of the end of the challenge. But 1024 was definitely not broken by then, at least not by brute force.

none of it is "brute force", GNFS is a process that rapidly excludes numbers from the search space that cannot be the answer, in principle similar to the way they broke enigma. numberphile has a great video on that one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4V2bpZlqx8 Also, taking the OP as a "worse case", afaik: 512bit = $8 so 1024 = 8^2 = $64 2048 = 8^2^2 = $4,096 4096 = 8^2^2 = $16,777,216 noting $8 for 512 seems very e…

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Re: Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud

#310
This is a little bit of a layman's question but maybe someone is interested:

When people go searching for prime numbers / bitcoin with massive compute, I assume that there are huge libraries of "shortcuts" to reduce the searching space, like prime numbers only appear with certain patterns, or there are large "holes" in the number space that do not need to be searched, etc. (see videos e.g. about how prime numbers make spirals on the polar coord. system, etc). I.e. if you know these you can accelerate/reduce your search cost by orders of magnitude.

For whatever various encryption algorithm that people choose to test or attack (like this story), is there somewhere such libraries of "shortcuts" are kept and well known? To reduce the brute force search need?

And is the state of sharing these to the point that the encryption services are designed to avoid the shortcut vulnerabilities?

Was always wondering this.

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