New Reductor Nation-State Malware Compromises TLS

Kaspersky has a detailed blog post about a new piece of sophisticated malware that it’s calling Reductor. The malware is able to compromise TLS traffic by infecting the computer with hacked TLS engine substituted on the fly, "marking" infected … Continue reading New Reductor Nation-State Malware Compromises TLS

New Reductor Nation-State Malware Compromises TLS

Kaspersky has a detailed blog post about a new piece of sophisticated malware that it’s calling Reductor. The malware is able to compromise TLS traffic by infecting the computer with hacked TLS engine substituted on the fly, "marking" infected TLS handshakes by compromising the underlining random-number generator, and adding new digital certificates. The result is that the attacker can identify,… Continue reading New Reductor Nation-State Malware Compromises TLS

Yubico Security Keys with a Crypto Flaw

Wow, is this an embarrassing bug: Yubico is recalling a line of security keys used by the U.S. government due to a firmware flaw. The company issued a security advisory today that warned of an issue in YubiKey FIPS Series devices with firmware versions 4.4.2 and 4.4.4 that reduced the randomness of the cryptographic keys it generates. The security keys… Continue reading Yubico Security Keys with a Crypto Flaw

CAs Reissue Over One Million Weak Certificates

Turns out that the software a bunch of CAs used to generate public-key certificates was flawed: they created random serial numbers with only 63 bits instead of the required 64. That may not seem like a big deal to the layman, but that one bit change means that the serial numbers only have half the required entropy. This really isn’t… Continue reading CAs Reissue Over One Million Weak Certificates

The "Extended Random" Feature in the BSAFE Crypto Library

Matthew Green wrote a fascinating blog post about the NSA’s efforts to increase the amount of random data exposed in the TLS protocol, and how it interacts with the NSA’s backdoor into the DUAL_EC_PRNG random number generator to weaken TLS…. Continue reading The "Extended Random" Feature in the BSAFE Crypto Library

The “Extended Random” Feature in the BSAFE Crypto Library

Matthew Green wrote a fascinating blog post about the NSA’s efforts to increase the amount of random data exposed in the TLS protocol, and how it interacts with the NSA’s backdoor into the DUAL_EC_PRNG random number generator to weaken TLS….
The post… Continue reading The “Extended Random” Feature in the BSAFE Crypto Library

Attack on Old ANSI Random Number Generator

Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a paper that pointed to a potential flaw in the ANSI X9.17 RNG standard. Now, new research has found that the flaw exists in some implementations of the RNG standard. Here’s the research paper, the website — complete with cute logo — for the attack, and Matthew Green’s excellent blog post on the research…. Continue reading Attack on Old ANSI Random Number Generator