Eight Bits of Trust; eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds

(scotthelme.co.uk)

93 points | by hkc 1 hour ago

15 comments

  • jlmorton 36 minutes ago
    In retrospect, having 100 trusted certificate authorities might have been excessive.
    • tclancy 18 minutes ago
      In retrospect, not having a tiny competency check may have been an oversight.
  • supernes 7 minutes ago
    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.
  • WalterGR 43 minutes ago
    Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50166579

    “eMudhra intermediate CA compromise” | 947 points | 19 hours ago | 408 comments

  • sscaryterry 13 minutes ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if we learn in the near future, that this was deliberate.
    • edent 3 minutes ago
      I'm not so sure. If you wanted to be deliberate, you'd choose a plausible value that you could control.

      No one is going to suspect `98761316832165974216498789746` is anything other than random. But `000000000000000123` looks suspicious.

    • yoavm 8 minutes ago
      Why would it be?
  • bombcar 46 minutes ago
    Of COURSE it's easy to crack, 4 isn't even prime!
    • DavidSJ 22 minutes ago
      In their defense, they were probably targeting the Mersenne prime 2^2 - 1 and just made a typo.
    • joshuat 41 minutes ago
      It’s really impressive no one caught their three previous private key values
      • bcvvvy 35 minutes ago
        I suspect they did but it wasn't publicised.
    • delibes 2 minutes ago
  • tclancy 16 minutes ago
    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.
  • positive-spite 56 minutes ago
    That's some criminal negligence right there.

    8 bits is crazytalk!

    • joshuat 42 minutes ago
      “4”

      hey chatgbg what is a “private key”

      • Hamuko 19 minutes ago
        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”.
  • dist-epoch 9 minutes ago
    > 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?

  • TazeTSchnitzel 29 minutes ago
    Could HN start feeding submissions through Pangram so us human readers don't have to suffer with reading the nauseating AI-prose?
    • jadamson 18 minutes ago
      It reads fine to me. If it is AI, I'd like to know which one so I can use it too.
      • stratos123 1 minute ago
        It reads okay to me too, yet Pangram says it's mixed - the "What a private key actually is" section is AI, so is 'Why "it cannot be contained"' and some others.
      • TazeTSchnitzel 14 minutes ago
        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.
    • marsven_422 6 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • siwatanejo 30 minutes ago
    • Qision 13 minutes ago
      Literally the tutorial they used
  • Qision 39 minutes ago
    It feels like they chose the private keys by hand.
    • PalmPilotProMax 34 minutes ago
      Artisanal cryptography. Hand-picked private keys salted with organically sourced nonces.
      • tclancy 18 minutes ago
        Brooklyn-based. Guy in overalls and a waxed mustache hands out the bits.
      • donandon 29 minutes ago
        Made with love
  • hypfer 18 minutes ago
    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".
  • maeln 34 minutes ago
    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.

    • dist-epoch 7 minutes ago
      And 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?

    • sobkas 18 minutes ago
      Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.
  • naabozaurus 37 minutes ago
    hey, at least it was easy to remember...