[Cryptography] Encryption opinion

[Watson Ladd]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 5:29 AM, Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>
wrote:
> ianG <iang at iang.org> writes:
>
>>b. RSA 1024 is considered a weak length these days. But it still depends
on
>>"against whom?"
>
<chop>
>
> Another example of this occurs with online commerce. Turn off every
cipher in
> your browser except single DES (I'm not sure if you can still enable
RC4/40)
> and go to your bank and transfer some funds, or go to eBay and buy
something.
> Watch the complete lack of anything that arises from this.

Did you miss BEAST? On a browser without 1/n-1 record splitting, with
certain extensions, we can steal cookies. The reason this isn't exploited
is everyone patched it.

MD5 collisions lead to a forged CA and Flame. Cryptanalysis of RC4 broke
WEP, and lead to the TJ Maxx breach. Bitcoin brain wallets are snarfed up
by bots watching for keys derived from common passwords. Keyloq got busted
wide open.

Some of us, including myself, work for organizations which have nasty,
nasty enemies. To the extent that we have "good enough' security on the
Internet, our ability to be secure becomes limited because we can't use
technology everyone is assumed to have. Single DES cryptanalysis is cheap:
if enough people could get in trouble if you had it, it would get done.

As for the original poster, I have found issues in many crypto libraries
that lead to all sorts of badness. It might look like it works, but ends up
dumping secrets all over the place.

Your average script kiddie isn't going to advance RC4 cryptanalysis when
they can use default passwords and the promise of dirty pictures to get
credit cards. The same applies to developing exploits. Would you say buffer
overruns aren't a problem because they are hard to exploit and so script
kiddies don't?
>
> Peter.
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-- 
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin
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