Yesterday, David Benjamin posted a pretty esoteric note on the IETF’s TLS mailing list. At a superficial level, the post describes some seizure-inducingly boring flaws in older Canon printers. To most people that was a complete snooze. To me and some of my colleagues, however, it was like that scene in X-Files where Mulder and Scully finally learn … Continue…
#rngs
6 posts
19 Dec 2017
23 Oct 2017
Before we get started, fair warning: this is going to be a post about a fairly absurd (but non-trivial!) attack on cryptographic systems. But that’s ok, because it’s based on a fairly absurd vulnerability. This work comes from Nadia Heninger, Shaanan Cohney and myself, and follows up on some work we’ve been doing to look … Continue reading Attack of…
19 Mar 2014
No matter how much cryptographers accomplish, we’re always building on a questionable foundation. (illustration: Marc S. Rousseau) Last week, Edward Snowden spoke to a packed crowd at SXSW about the many problems (and limited solutions) facing those of us who want to keep our communications private. Snowden said a number of things — including a … Continue reading How do…
28 Dec 2013
Last Friday, Joseph Menn from Reuters published an article claiming that RSA, the pioneering security firm and division of EMC, accepted $10 million dollars to include the Dual EC random number generator as the default in their flagship BSAFE library. I’ve written a bit about Dual EC on this blog, so readers will know that I don’t think highly ……
20 Sept 2013
In today’s news of the weird, RSA (a division of EMC) has recommended that developers desist from using the (allegedly) ‘backdoored’ Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator — which happens to be the default in RSA’s BSafe cryptographic toolkit. Youch. In case you’re missing the story here, Dual_EC_DRBG (which I wrote about yesterday) is the random number generator voted most likely to…
18 Sept 2013
The Dual_EC_DRBG generator from NIST SP800-90A. Update 9/19: RSA warns developers not to use the default Dual_EC_DRBG generator in BSAFE. Oh lord. As a technical follow up to my previous post about the NSA’s war on crypto, I wanted to make a few specific points about standards. In particular I wanted to address the allegation that … Continue reading The…