Monday, October 28, 2013

"The Keys to the Keydom"


An interesting piece below from Brian Hayes on vulnerability of the RSA encryption system, based upon occasional shared prime number factors (nothing that wasn't already known, but nicely-explained and interesting storyline):

http://bit-player.org/2013/the-keys-to-the-keydom

From the article:
"...The output was a list of 64,081 compromised keys for TLS hosts, about 0.5 percent of all such keys collected...
"The good news is that none of the weak keys are guarding access to major web servers hosting bank accounts or medical records or stock markets or military installations. Most of them are found in embedded networked devices, such as routers and firewalls. That’s also the bad news. A programmer with malicious intent who can gain control of a well-placed router can make a lot of mischief."

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