A note on vendor reaction speed to the e=3 problem

[Peter Gutmann]

When I fired up Firefox a few minutes ago it told me that there was a new
update available to fix security problems.  I thought, "Hmm, I wonder what
that would be...".  It's interesting to note that we now have fixes for many
of the OSS crypto apps (OpenSSL, gpg, Firefox (via NSS, so probably
Thunderbird as well), my own cryptlib), but nothing from any of the commercial
vendors.  Maybe someone should convert this into a DRM attack so Microsoft
will fix it before 2007 :-).

(The real #*($&#*( for me is that I wanted to turn off e=3 years ago, but when
I did it in a snapshot release some squawk piped up to say that they were
using e=3 and the standard said it was OK and I was being non-standards
compliant and so on and so forth, so in the end I had to leave it enabled.  I
did make it very easy to turn off with a single-character code change, but
that may explain why commercial vendors are going to be reluctant to rush out
a fix without a lot of prior impact assessment).

Peter.

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