Amazon Web Services signature version 1 is insecure

Re:Amazon Web Services signature version 1 is insecure by jgrahamc on Thursday December 18, 2008 @05:39AM (#402007)

My assumption is that the Amazon people felt that by using HMAC-SHA1 they were secure because that's a well known way of hashing and signing something. The pitfall was in their implementation. They have such a simple system, yet they managed to make a mistake.

This sort of problem is one of the reasons that I made the crypto in tumbler (http://tumbler.sf.net/) as simple as possible because I was sure that if I did anything but total simplicity I would screw it up.

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Re:Amazon Web Services signature version 1 is insecure by tptacek on Thursday December 18, 2008 @12:30PM (#402324)

And because Tumbler is basically a dumbed-down version of the RADIUS protocol, you still wound up with the same major security flaw: if you sniff a Tumbler message off the wire, you can crack it with an incremental SHA256 cracker (which is much faster than Unix crypt).

You told people to pick good "passwords"; you should change the language to say "generate good 128 bit random strings".

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