5 ms·
It's a 16-bit version of Salsa20, which is far less secure. Proof: this project. I have no clue what possessed the author to do this. Stop hand-rolling crypto,
by RUBwkVjwLsDKgPw 11y ago
It's a 16-bit version of Salsa20, which is far less secure. Proof: this project. I have no clue what possessed the author to do this.
Stop hand-rolling crypto, people! Ransomware needs security too. :(
- an_account_name 11y agoIt's a way of sponsoring community-led crypto research.
- mangeletti 11y agoMy guess is that the authors wanted to ensure they could encrypt a full disk quickly.
- arviewer 11y agoMaybe it's just a test to see how quickly this was broken.
- PeCaN 11y agoOn the other hand, it's not a critical security application. If someone breaks it, you just don't get a little money. If the exploit becomes widespread, you can update the malware. The author probably wanted to be able to somewhat quickly encrypt/decrypt a full disk on potentially slow hardware.
- CamperBob2 10y agoEven a poorly-implemented homebrew encryption function would have been better than using a broken implementation of a common, trivially-recognizable function. It was easy for them to run this code through an SMT solver because it was easy to obtain the original source code. It would have been smarter to bundle the ransomware with a 32-bit DOS extender so the known-good Salsa implementation could be used unchanged.