[ale] 4 of 1000 public keys provide no security

[Jay Lozier]

On 02/17/2012 11:01 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
> Just to play devil's advocate here:
>
> 1) The keys searched span over 20 years of key material, so many of these
> bad keys are probably expired.
> 2) Only one of those "bad" keys was signed by a trusted CA
> 2a) that one key had already expired
> 3) There were a bunch of known "keygen" bugs (including a major one in
> OpenSSL) a few years ago, and most likely these keys were generated with
> those known bugs.
>
> So I would not write this off as the end of the world.  I would, instead,
> take it as a lesson that minor things (like a Bad RNG) can truly affect
> the outcome of the system as a whole.  However even a bad RNG is only
> likely to affect multiple users of that bad RNG.  The research did not
> explore the origins of the "bad keys".
>
> -derek, your resident security guru, and instigator of the RSA129 crack team.
My take on the article is that cryptographic systems have both technical 
and human problems. In this case there was/is a potentially serious 
technical problem with key generation. This will affect only those using 
the affected software and the article did not comment on who was using 
the software.

A couple of other points, the article did not indicate what the keys 
were actually used for, one time use or recurrent. If one time use, then 
how long does it take to crack the key and how time sensitive is the 
data. A relatively weak key that still takes considerable time to break 
may deter crackers and if the data is not very sensitive cracking the 
key may do minimal, if any, harm. The data is still encrypted but the 
encryption is not as strong as it could/should be.

Personally, I would worry more about users logging on from an open 
hotspot were some of the information is sent as plain text.
>
> On Fri, February 17, 2012 10:47 am, George Allen wrote:
>> Judging by this, Could there be a potential to make rainbow tables vs.
>> SSL keys?!
>>
>> > From ARS:
>>
>> An astonishing four out of every 1,000 public keys protecting webmail,
>> online banking, and other sensitive online services provide no
>> cryptographic security, a team of mathematicians has found. The
>> research is the latest to reveal limitations in the tech used by more
>> than a million Internet sites to prevent eavesdropping.
>>
>> The finding, reported in a paper (PDF) submitted to a cryptography
>> conference in August, is based on the analysis of some 7.1 million
>> 1024-bit RSA keys published online. By subjecting what's known as the
>> "modulus" of each public key to an algorithm first postulated more
>> than 2,000 years ago by the Greek mathematician Euclid, the
>> researchers looked for underlying factors that were used more than
>> once. Almost 27,000 of the keys they examined were cryptographically
>> worthless because one of the factors used to generate them was used by
>> at least one other key.
>>
>> "The fact is, if these numbers had the entropy that they were supposed
>> to have, the probability of even one of these events happening in 7
>> million public keys would be vanishingly small," James P. Hughes, an
>> independent cryptographer who participated in the research, told Ars.
>> "We thought that was rather startling."
>>
>> ...
>>
>> The revelation that such a large proportion of public keys were
>> generated with a prime factor shared by one or more other keys means
>> that such keys are trivial to break by anyone who can identify them.
>> What's more, the percentage of keys known to be generated with
>> non-unique factors is likely to grow as more keys are analyzed. The
>> 0.38 percentage rate of faulty keys found when the researchers looked
>> at 7.1 million total keys compares with a 0.26 percent rate in an
>> earlier analysis that considered only 4.7 million RSA moduli. As a
>> result, the true number of keys that could be broken using the
>> technique may be higher than the current research reveals.
>>
>> ...
>>
>> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/crypto-shocker-four-of-every-1000-public-keys-provide-no-security.ars?src=fbk
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>


-- 
Jay Lozier
jslozier at gmail.com