Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

Re:Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Go... by tptacek on Saturday December 19, 2015 @03:57PM (#10764819)

I wonder if that's going to be demonstrated to be a true statement, and further whether the tampering Juniper discovered will have disabled that second step.

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Re:Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Go... by pbsd on Saturday December 19, 2015 @04:20PM (#10764902)

It seems to be a true statement: Dual EC is used to seed a X9.31 generator with 3DES, where 8 bytes are the initial seed V, and the remaining 24 are K (cf. [1]). I don't see any other usage of Dual EC other than to self-test and to seed X9.31.

Oddly, you can disable the Dual EC seeding with the flag 'one-stage-rng'. But not the other way around.

[1] http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cavp/documents/rng/931rngext...

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Re:Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Go... by tptacek on Saturday December 19, 2015 @07:14PM (#10765463)

Unless the backdoor disables the X9.31 stage, what's the point of tampering with the Dual EC RNG, if its outputs are going to be mangled anyways?

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Re:Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Go... by pbsd on Saturday December 19, 2015 @07:48PM (#10765561)

I don't know, it makes little sense to me too. Maybe there's some subtle flaw somewhere, which I haven't spotted. Since subtlety doesn't seem to be a thing with the changes we've seen so far, I'm not sure what to think.

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