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I have good faith that they didn't, or certainly not all of them. When Alex described the entire process they went through, he also smirked that should that pri
by bostik 11y ago
I have good faith that they didn't, or certainly not all of them. When Alex described the entire process they went through, he also smirked that should that primary key ever get compromised they have several others, almost as good, ready as drop-in replacements.
I do think he also mentioned that they only cared about keys that had their required prefix; all others were destroyed without anyone ever having access to them.
- p4bl0 11y ago> I do think he also mentioned that they only cared about keys that had their required prefix; all others were destroyed without anyone ever having access to them. Okay, that is what I was implying would be terrible otherwise. But actually it is quite obvious that they would not spend the disk space necessary the keep every single generated key pairs now that I think about it.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoHow would that be terrible?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- p4bl0 11y agoThe number of generated key pair to find "facebook" + keywords must have been gigantic, maybe even so much that it could be used as a kind of rainbow table which would allow people (or three letters agencies) who can access it to attack hidden services that use one of the .onion for which a corresponding private key is known.
- baby 11y agoThis is not vulnerable to brute-force nor rainbow tables.
- besselheim 11y agoRelative to the 2^80 (1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176) possible onion addresses, whatever they generated would be miniscule.
- p4bl0 11y agoIndeed. I was being stupid and didn't take the time to really think it through. Thanks to you and all the others who pointed that out :).
- shanemhansen 11y agoPresumably those 3 letter agencies also have the technology to generate RSA keys.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoThat shouldn't matter. If the scheme is vulnerable when some company generates a bunch of keys, it is vulnerable whether those keys are deleted or not.
- geofft 11y agoIf that is indeed tractable for a side project at Facebook over a few weeks, it's definitely tractable for someone who actually cares to attack Tor.
- reitanqild 11y agoIf I understand correctly finding an "equally good" domain name starting with facebook<something> should be equally possible yes. Finding that same one again? Not likely.
- herbst 11y agoThis was a huge discussion on the Tor blog or subreddit. It was concluded that it is unlikely that they even found one existing key.
- jakobegger 11y agoNope. They ran a cluster to generate billions of addresses, and used some logic to find a nice one. But that won't help them a bit to find a specific address, since all the addresses they generated are only a vanishingly small fraction of the possible addresses.
- evgen 11y agoIf the key hash did not have facebook as the first eight characters it did not even get passed up to the aggregator and was instantly discarded.