hannob

Never attribute to malice what can sufficiently be explained by the love of software developers for overengineering and complexity.

Seriously, I have no trouble explaining this. Overengineering is just how many people think software development works. It's unfortunate, it causes plenty of problems, but it's not a sign of malicious intent.

To put that in perspective: I noticed that private key parsing was 70 times slower in early 3.x versions. I think it's only 8 times slower in current versions. That's still... a lot slower. For no good reason.

I don't see "we fixed some of the the excessive performance regressions that we introduced in 3.0". Unfortunate...

Context: https://cryptography.io/en/latest/statements/state-of-openss...

I wish people who report "exploitation attempts" would be very clear about what they actually observed.

Something that would lead to an uncontrolled memory corruption, potentially leading to a crash, or something that indicates a real, code-executing exploit? Those two kinds events are of very different significance. I can't read from Amazon's announcement which one they think they saw.

I cannot edit my comment, but it seems it's there's remote impact, so have to correct myself: https://mastodon.social/@hanno/117484049093015780

From the little info one can see here, it looks like this is a PHP script causing a memory corruption. So you probably need to be able to run PHP code to exploit it.

That's... not a particularly unusual issue. PHP has a large codebase, releases with plenty of fixed crashes come out regularly. It becomes critical if there's a remote path to exploitation.

I see no indication that this is a "critical" PHP flaw. And the Reply from the person who found it seems to confirm that. ("I keep getting asked about mitigations, here's the mitigation: don't worry about it kitten")

Makes no sense.

If it was deliberate, one would use keys that only the person abusing it has. Not keys everyone can guess if they get a hint.

Every time there is a CA issue, someone comes up with "this would be so much better if we'd make it more complex than it already is, as it would make it a bit more convenient to deal with the most recent issue".

I don't think that's the right way to think about it.

The blog post doesn't mention the term, but what it describes is commonly known as a "modulo bias" in cryptography.

See also: https://romailler.ch/2020/07/28/crypto-modulo_bias_guide/

Kinda interesting that this is getting so much attention.

Ultimately, the example.com domain is just there so you can use it in documentation or code examples. Your expectation about the actual example.com domain should basically be none at all, maybe with the exception that it's hopefully not doing actively malicious things like serving malware or running a catchall mailbox feeding spammers.

Whatever HTML they server or if they serve anything at all... shouldn't matter.

I mean, we eliminated smallpox viruses, and the impact was that humans no longer die from smallpox. We have almost eliminated polio, which has the impact that nobody needs an iron lung any more. We have massively reduced the incidence of a whole range of other pathogens. Are you concerned about that, too?

I'd be much more concerned about the changes humans do to our ecosystems that we know cause harm, but aren't stopping (like filling the atmosphere with CO2 and other greenhouse gases) than about changes that would, almost certainly, reduce harm and have only extremely unlikely and hypothetical risks.

Welcome to the club!

There's an impersonation profile of me on Github (username happyhannob). I've reported it a while ago, received the same automated message, and no reaction otherwise. It's still online.

I guess you can't expect basic fraud prevention from a company currently building the future with AI...

I think you're looking for the large formula at the top here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_number_field_sieve

Reference to a scientific paper is given: https://www.ams.org/notices/199612/pomerance.pdf

oss-security gets relatively little use? You must know another oss-security. The one I'm subscribed to is very much alive and an important source of information for me.

There are reasons browsers do things the way they do.

Experience and user studies have shown that users have a hard time decoding what error messages mean. "This certificate is expired, but only for a little while" isn't meaningful for people who don't have a mental model of what a certificate is.

Furthermore, "downgrading" warnings increases the incentive to ignore issues, potentially causing more problems down the line.

My best guess would be some kind of netapp product, as we saw some self-signed certs on hosts that identified as netapp. But netapp didn't answer, and we got either no or no useful feedback from any of the certificate owners. So we ended up being unable to figure that out.

I'll probably share a list in some way soon and will try to ask the wider cryptographic and TLS community if anyone can figure it out.

My prediction would be that it won't become mainstream.

Even if it will be practically possible to build quantum computers for average users (given they currently rely on complex physical experiments, one can doubt that), there's the question of whether there's a need for "mainstream" quantum computing.

As has often been said, quantum computers aren't some magical thing that makes every computation faster. They are faster at some very specific problems like breaking cryptography (I doubt that there's a mass market for decrypting the old WIFI traffic you stored from your neighbor, and, these days, most internet traffic is already pq safe) and simulating physics (also probably not something average joe wants to do every day).

In all likelihood, quantum computers will be specialized devices used, e.g., by scientists. You may be able to rent your quantum computing time if that gets cheap enough to be practical, but I doubt many people will ever own one.

I would take this with a very huge grain of salt.

The only source seems to be a fringe right-wing news webpage (Apollo News) citing from an internal paper (which, it sounds to me, is just a vague proposal from a media oversight body). I have not seen any reports in major news publications, and would assume there's a lot of context missing in this reporting.

Historic bit: in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a bit of a trend - and quite some tension - of demoscene parties getting taken over by LAN parties. I believe the Gathering used to be a demoscene party, but completely transformed into a gaming LAN party.

There were also those that tried to be both (I believe Assembly is doing both to this day) or those that kept the gaming out (Mekka/Symposium, which no longer exists, but there's been a followup party called Breakpoint, and later another followup called Revision that still exists).

As far as cloud service servers are concerned, I don't think ARM CPUs have any meaningful marketshare, right?

You could start running things on ARM, but, almost certainly, that comes with a lot of extra friction. (Not saying that isn't a bad idea, it'd probably improve the ecosystem as a whole and flush out architecture-specific assumptions in server software. But it's not someting trivial to do.)

I think this one is among the most significant findings: https://factorable.net/

I also believe there were some android ASLR issues based on the same weakness (i.e., low early boot-time entropy).

But this is all quite old, and there've been massive improvements. Basically, "don't use a very old linux kernel" is your mitigation for these issues.

Making hydrogen from seawater is not an actual problem that needs solving.

The problem with hydrogen electrolysis is its energy requirements to split water. The energy requirements for the desalination of water before that is a rounding error. It's not worth the hassle to develop electrolyzers that can deal with seawater.

I know quite a bit about PKI and X.509, and I can tell you that much: the overlap with how DNSSEC works is limited.

Buy a pack of 20x500mg (just checked, common size in Germany), take 2-3 every half hour for a while.

Sure, that's extreme. But if you're unaware of the risks, you feel sick, and you believe it's helping you.

I mean, people aren't killing themselves in masses with it, but it happens every now and then. Easily imaginable that one in a few million people will have enough tendency to take more pills and is unaware of the overdose danger.

> You're supposed to concatenate all the input numbers, to create a message that has hundreds or thousands of digits; then RSA-encrypt that number.

That's not how it works...

In modern protocols, you don't encrypt at all with RSA. You use a key exchange, and if you use RSA, you only use it as a signature algorithm to initiate the key exchange.

If you happen to want to encrypt with RSA, which you usually shouldn't, you first use a padding algorithm (the modern variant of that is called RSA-OAEP) with which you prepare and then encrypt a random key. That key you then use for symmetric encryption.

You're training users to click away error messages.

> Has everyone lost their minds?

Clearly yes. (Ok, not everyone, but large parts of the IT and software development community.)

Well...

There's a long history of people trying to build software that detects bad software. It's known as Antivirus software. It doesn't work very well, because you're up against fundamental truths of computational theory (the halting problem).

Your understanding is entirely wrong.

Most hydrogen fueling stations receive it from the next steam reformer, which will make it from fossil gas.