Millions of high-security crypto keys crippled by newly discovered flaw

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 16, 2017 at 1:23:30 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Millions of high-security crypto keys crippled by newly discovered flaw
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Millions of high-security crypto keys crippled by newly discovered flaw
> Factorization weakness lets attackers impersonate key holders and decrypt their data.
> By Dan Goodin
> Oct 16 2017
> <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/crypto-failure-cripples-millions-of-high-security-keys-750k-estonian-ids/>
>
> A crippling flaw in a widely used code library has fatally undermined the security of millions of encryption keys 
> used in some of the highest-stakes settings, including national identity cards, software- and application-signing, 
> and trusted platform modules protecting government and corporate computers.
>
> The weakness allows attackers to calculate the private portion of any vulnerable key using nothing more than the 
> corresponding public portion. Hackers can then use the private key to impersonate key owners, decrypt sensitive data, 
> sneak malicious code into digitally signed software, and bypass protections that prevent accessing or tampering with 
> stolen PCs. The five-year-old flaw is also troubling because it's located in code that complies with two 
> internationally recognized security certification standards that are binding on many governments, contractors, and 
> companies around the world. The code library was developed by German chipmaker Infineon and has been generating weak 
> keys since 2012 at the latest.
>
> The flaw is the one Estonia's government obliquely referred to last month when it warned that 750,000 digital IDs 
> issued since 2014 were vulnerable to attack. Estonian officials said they were closing the ID card public key 
> database to prevent abuse. On Monday, officials posted this update. Last week, Microsoft, Google, and Infineon all 
> warned how the weakness can impair the protections built into TPM products that ironically enough are designed to 
> give an additional measure of security to high-targeted individuals and organizations.
>
> Completely broken
>
> "In public key cryptography, a fundamental property is that public keys really are public—you can give them to anyone 
> without any impact in security," Graham Steel, CEO of encryption consultancy Cryptosense, told Ars. "In this work, 
> that property is completely broken." He continued:
>
> It means that if you have a document digitally signed with someone's private key, you can't prove it was really them 
> who signed it. Or if you sent sensitive data encrypted under someone's public key, you can't be sure that only they 
> can read it. You could now go to court and deny that it was you that signed something—there would be no way to prove 
> it, because theoretically, anyone could have worked out your private key.
>
> Both Steel and Petr Svenda, one of the researchers who discovered the faulty library, also warned the flaw has, or at 
> least had, the potential to create problems for elections in countries where vulnerable cards are used. While actual 
> voter fraud would be difficult to carry out, particularly on a scale needed to sway elections, "just the possibility 
> (although impractical) is troubling as it is support for various fake news or conspiracy theories," Svenda, who is a 
> professor at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, told Ars. Invoking the prolific leakers of classified National 
> Security Agency material, Steel added: "Imagine a Shadowbrokers-like organization posts just a couple of private keys 
> on the Internet and claims to have used the technique to break many more.”
>
> [snip]
>
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