Two more things to note about impact assessment: Flatpak uses the selected runtime's baked-in trust store (I think), so any apps may be susceptible even if you update the system package. Containers also don't inherit the host's trust store and use the one from the base image.
I will say, there’s something almost reassuring when something goes boom that badly and the story is really silly. It’s like [horrific human-caused disaster] but it’s because of a Three Stooges episode.
I think it's a hybrid text. The section about how elliptic curve keys work is particularly aggravating. Unfortunately it's also the only section that gave me new information.
This is not a good write-up. Yesterday's discussion did contain better data, less self-Promotion and actually asked why it happened, instead of just saying "number small".
Kind of hard to understand how a bug would have generated a second pair of key so bad, and how would human would have ended up using them. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, but sometimes you wonder.
Also an equal amount of stupidity in the whole ecosystem, apparently there are no "unit-tests" for trivial failure modes, like 8 bits of entropy, before adding a CA to the trusted list.
What next, googling the public key finds a 2 year old pastebin with the private key?
Two more things to note about impact assessment: Flatpak uses the selected runtime's baked-in trust store (I think), so any apps may be susceptible even if you update the system package. Containers also don't inherit the host's trust store and use the one from the base image.
In retrospect, having 100 trusted certificate authorities might have been excessive.
In retrospect, not having a tiny competency check may have been an oversight.
I wouldn't be surprised if we learn in the near future, that this was deliberate.
Why would it be?
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50166579
“eMudhra intermediate CA compromise” | 947 points | 19 hours ago | 408 comments
> and no TLS certificates chaining to these CAs ever showed up in CT
Why are browsers trusting CAs which issued zero certificates since their creation 1 year ago?
Of COURSE it's easy to crack, 4 isn't even prime!
In their defense, they were probably targeting the Mersenne prime 2^2 - 1 and just made a typo.
It’s really impressive no one caught their three previous private key values
I suspect they did but it wasn't publicised.
I will say, there’s something almost reassuring when something goes boom that badly and the story is really silly. It’s like [horrific human-caused disaster] but it’s because of a Three Stooges episode.
That's some criminal negligence right there.
8 bits is crazytalk!
“4”
hey chatgbg what is a “private key”
Maybe they were counting on the fact that usually the right answer to “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 10” is “7”.
Could HN start feeding submissions through Pangram so us human readers don't have to suffer with reading the nauseating AI-prose?
It reads fine to me. If it is AI, I'd like to know which one so I can use it too.
I think it's a hybrid text. The section about how elliptic curve keys work is particularly aggravating. Unfortunately it's also the only section that gave me new information.
This is not a good write-up. Yesterday's discussion did contain better data, less self-Promotion and actually asked why it happened, instead of just saying "number small".
https://xkcd.com/221/
Literally the tutorial they used
eMudhra explanation : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c11
Kind of hard to understand how a bug would have generated a second pair of key so bad, and how would human would have ended up using them. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, but sometimes you wonder.
Also an equal amount of stupidity in the whole ecosystem, apparently there are no "unit-tests" for trivial failure modes, like 8 bits of entropy, before adding a CA to the trusted list.
What next, googling the public key finds a 2 year old pastebin with the private key?
Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It feels like they chose the private keys by hand.
Artisanal cryptography. Hand-picked private keys salted with organically sourced nonces.
Brooklyn-based. Guy in overalls and a waxed mustache hands out the bits.
Made with love
hey, at least it was easy to remember...