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Cascais | 1 year ago

Probably the good old "legacy issues", hardware compatibility and trying to save money. It's a reflection on society.

discuss

order

dlenski|1 year ago

(I'm the author.)

> hardware compatibility

I don't have any evidence that hardware compatibility plays any significant role at all in the persistence of insecurely-sized or badly-generated keys for public-key cryptography.

Do you have a reason to think otherwise?

Cascais|1 year ago

Well, sort of. But I probably could explained myself better, and maybe compatibility is not the right word, because this can be considered to go beyond compatibility.

Some remarks that I found interesting on the topic:

-While compatibility/reliability are 110% nice (compatibility being defined as "it works"), that doesn't mean full stability in generating entropy. "Components may be perfect; composition(they all together) can still be flawed", where the components are: Device Hardware, Device OS, and Device Software (KeyGen)"

- "in low-margin devices there aren't high-quality entropy sources to rely on", so its harder to know for sure that key was well generated.

- a large scale on RSA keys enabled the detection of entropy failures that manifested in the RSA keys of millions of devices. Most affected product families were lower-margin devices past their end-of-support date.

https://www.acsac.org/2023/program/final/s111.html https://www.acsac.org/2023/files/web/slides/chi-111-weakrsak... https://samvartaka.github.io/cryptanalysis/2017/01/03/33c3-e...