Submitted 12 hours ago by glups@piefed.social to [deleted]
There are two parts to this answer.
First, as many have pointed out, eMudhra as a trusted certificate authority has issued eight high-level certificates with a key length of onle 3-8 bits, when they should be 384 bits long. And yes, the smallest key was ‘4’.
But the other point is tha xkcd predicted using 4 as a random number, decades ago. It was supposed to be a joke.
xkcd also happened to release a comic about a “vulnerability in the number 3” the same day the eMudhra news broke.
Check the alt text on that one :-)
That’s not “happened to”; read the title text if you want to remove all reasonable doubt that it’s a reference to it.
Oh my god, I thought that was a recent meme someone made because of this debacle, didn’t know it was an OG xkcd…
supposed to …
Because it was revealed that an actual TLS certificate used the number 4 as a private key.
Not just a old certificate, A root CA certificate trusted by pretty much everything
because 42 would have been too obvious.
You may find that answr from another community helpful: feddit.online/comment/10016475
That was a really good answer actually
Aw, thanks
An organization trusted with the security of potentially billions of people essentially used the password “4” among other bad choices.
You can read the technical explanation here: emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com
arstechnica.com/…/the-internet-goes-on-high-alert…
It’s hard to properly describe how big a fuckup this is. All I will say is that all the coverage I’ve seen is underselling the potential for harm. There’s nothing you can do except update your shit, pray that everyone in the upstream supply chain of every service you use has updated their shit, and take comfort in the fact that there are no proven wild exploits out there (yet).
“Lemmeme” tho. ’twas RIGHT there.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
There is a massive security incident this week where an Indian certificate authority used 4 as the private key they used to sign encrypted internet traffic with.
Knowing their secret key lets anyone forge certificates that they can use to snoop on or modify internet traffic.
All 8 of their private keys were under 255, so could be trivially guessed. These certificates were accepted by all major browsers and operating systems, as well as many programming languages and tools.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
But, since nobody would expect an organization like that to have a one digit key, wouldn’t that make it extremely hard to guess?
Half kidding here.
StabbingSky@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
Not if you’re brute forcing it.
scytale@piefed.zip 6 hours ago
Security by obscurity is what it’s called in the industry, and yeah it’s not a good way to do it. Automation and scripts would make it trivial to guess.
theneverfox@pawb.social 6 hours ago
It’s kinda like locking your door by putting a wedge in the crack. Probably, no one is going to try to open your door anyways, and probably, even if they did no one is going to take 5 seconds to examine the door and figure it out
But if someone does, it’s laughably easy to figure it out
balsoft@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
Well, someone did guess it so it’s not that hard. The entropy was really low.
Indigobunting@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Nit: That that key doesn’t technically encrypt traffic, if I understand correctly. It’s used to verify the identify of a website. So someone with this private key can’t directly read internet traffic. They can set up a man-in-the-middle attack, but they’d also have to compromise DNS to pull it off.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
Yes, I think you’re correct
reksas@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
I just dont understand why they would do this? Putting so shitty key is like they wanted to make it as insecure as possible. Even if the ones responsible were criminally stupid, they still should have understood that this is like leaving the whole thing unlocked.
And for such critical thing. Imagine if this wasnt discovered like this but instead by some competent malicious actor that had resources to coordinate some large scale attack and kept it hidden until just the right moment when they can strike at everything.
I also dont understand how little outrage there even is about this, we were really close to huge catastrophe. Or maybe i have misunderstood the severity of what happened.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 8 hours ago
They are saying there were mistakes made with their key generation scripts:
Source: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c11
Personally I’m still a little confused why it makes any difference that the keys were intended for export to their European and US operations