Here the crypto used by the ransomware seems to be thoroughly and systematically broken, so while it's certainly possible that a stronger variant will appear, I have my doubts on the author's capacity to do much "better" any time soon. I'm far from being a cryptographer, but at a glance it looks so weak I have to wonder if it's deliberate.

People who are cryptographers have a tough time writing secure implementations the first time around, is it really surprising that amateurs do?

Presumably they have enough financial resources at the moment, they don't have to do it themselves. They can pay someone to do it.

Most anyone able to charge market rates might be more motivated to reveal they've been contracted to do this than to actually do that.

Someone who has a hard time getting market rates might not be as qualified to fix the software as they think they are.

There are places in the world were good computer / science education doesn't necessarily mean being able to demand "market rates" comparable to the West. I can see some programmer n Russia or Romania being tempted by a side-deal like this. Especially if presented with a Western "market rate".

Many programmers in Russia and some eastern european countries probably wouldn't even see that as a "side deal"

I haven't been back there in many years now, and tried to give the benefit of the doubt ;-)

>at a glance it looks so weak I have to wonder if it's deliberate.

Any suppositions as to why it would be deliberate?

Maybe the person who posted the exploit/solution was the person who created the ransomware? That way they get BTC from people who pay and donations from people who wait?

/krazyconspiracy :-P

If I was an aspiring ransomware writer, I'd extract _a lot_ of useful ideas from this thread. :P

The targets for this malware are laypeople with enough funds to pay the fee but not enough to go after the creators. Hypothetically, if a national government or other agent with sufficiently deep pockets were infected they would first attempt to crack it, failing that they would go after the creators directly- they would not pay the fee.

So implementing weak crypto dramatically lowers the risk of prosecution or worse for the attackers.

Maybe not deliberate, but most likely optimizing encrypting speed over stronger encryption. Better for hit and runs I guess.

To add to the suppositions: perhaps the author was afraid they may get bitten by their own malware and designed in a weakness as a backdoor in case they lost access to the key server and needed to decrypt their own drive.

This is my favourite of all the answers, because it would mean that the dev would have known how incompetent s/he was, and thus made a weak system in order to account for the likelihood of a "self-inflicted wound".

Here's one...maybe the actual developer who was contracted to build the damned thing purposely used weak encryption to try to ameliorate his/her part in making this malware mess.

Well, I can't say that it's deliberate, but it's definitely some "interesting" choices.

A reasonable Salsa20/20 implementation on a modest processor encrypts on the order of 400MiB/s [0][1]. So that the author went to the trouble of halving the number of rounds and changing the word-size when there are perfectly good and plenty fast off-the-shelf Salsa implementations strikes me as rather strange. Surely this is not the bottleneck on most employee's machines.

And then there's the apparently tiny keyspace used. You could argue that this makes the key more "user-friendly" (!), but just a hex representation of a random 256bit key would seem much more natural, and the poor targets are hardly in a position to complain.

[0] https://www.cryptopp.com/benchmarks.html [1] https://cr.yp.to/snuffle.html

Actually customer service is very important to these operations. They have to create trust that paying will relieve your machine of their infliction.

Maybe they wanted to keep CPU usage low? Although disk usage would be noticeable as well (usually).

As a security reporter I perceived a large technical gap between the developer of warez and most users, who tend to pay a one time or ongoing license for use of some tool. While a developer of illicit tools may adjust in a future release, typically the user does not have capabilities to patch their own tooling.

Interesting assertion. What have you seen to make you think this?

Also, does it apply to the PHP/Perl world of malware, the kind that gets installed on cracked, old and weak WordPress sites? There's 20 variations of "Web Shell by oRb" floating around, for example, and many, many versions of Perl IRC bots, for example.

In many cases (don't know about this one) they come after the network has been shot down.

I'm curious as to also why they just don't go for full Salsa20 and do 32-bit words instead, seems like a logical quick fix upgrade that might break the decryption.

Maybe some machine they are targeting (hospitals?) only work with 16-bit words.