4 ms·
People have made scare posts like this before. In reality this is not an issue, since the public keys in the key server are not the actual public key the user p
by cyphar 11y ago
People have made scare posts like this before. In reality this is not an issue, since the public keys in the key server are not the actual public key the user pushed. Due to random factors (cosmic rays, bad memory controllers) at some point in the many copy operations required to send packets to the Internet, the data was silently corrupted and the result was a weak PGP key. If you actually email the users, I guarantee they'll tell you that isn't their real public key.
- gherkin0 11y ago> If you actually email the users, I guarantee they'll tell you that isn't their real public key. Have you tried emailing them to test your theory?
- jsmthrowaway 11y agoI did a little easier than that. I picked two people at random with vanity domains (assuming they'd advertise their key on their site) and did a keyserver lookup for them, and noticed that two keys were submitted to the keyserver on the same exact day for both of them: the broken one from this Web site, and the other one that they advertise as their PGP key. Same key type, same size, same date, same UIDs, different fingerprints. Not really data, but interesting nonetheless to OP's point (and, if true, a little more ammo in my disliking-keyservers gun). The real data is how often the exponent 281479271743489 appears on that page. That really points toward bugs in key generation, IMO. Bad gpg at some point?
- cyphar 11y agoYeah, the exponent not being prime does point toward a broken key generation algorithm.
- asciilifeform 11y agoSome of them have legit self-sigs. Also cosmic rays?
- msbarnett 11y agoIBM estimated in the '90s that an average desktop computer experienced soft-errors from cosmic rays (energetic neutrons striking a memory cell or data bus, perturbing it enough to flip a bit) at a rate of 1 incident/per 256 Megs of RAM/per month
- sosuke 11y agoI want to know more that sounds awesome: Was this it? http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/0b9bc46ed06cbac1852565e6006fe1a0/922f6bbd8495db1485256bfa0067fc4e!OpenDocument http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/0b9bc4... http://www.ida.liu.se/labs/eslab/SNDFT/docs/IBMdram.pdf http://www.ida.liu.se/labs/eslab/SNDFT/docs/IBMdram.pdf "This clearly indicates that because of cosmic rays, for every 256 Mbytes of memory, you'll get one soft error a month," said Tim Dell, senior design engineer for IBM Microelectronics. "The same phenomenon for hard errors with multiple bits will also come into effect with soft errors."
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoCosmic rays are a big problem for supercomputers. There was a very interesting piece [1] on it in Spectrum recently. One of the funniest anecdotes was about a DEC AlphaServers machine installed at Los Alamos, where they had to put a running server blade inside a neutron beam and confirm the error rates spiked in order to convince the manufacturer that the machines were improperly shielded. [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-supercomputer-dirty-power-cosmic-rays-and-bad-solder http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-su...
- cyphar 11y agoCosmic rays can cause bit-flips (as sibling commenter mentioned). But there's also other interesting ways that bits can flip in memory. For example, Sun had an interesting issue with their SRAM where their manufacturer had accidentally doped the SRAM with radioactive boron. This resulted in alpha particles being emitted that caused corruption in the SRAM (which then caused Solaris to crash because they had parity bit checking).
- 11y ago
- emmab 11y agoThat's still a problem. Having an incorrect breakable public key posted on the server. Why doesn't the key server scan for this and reject them?
- asciilifeform 11y agoAsk the SKS folks why not?
- cyphar 11y agoKey severs don't implement any non-trivial verification. Presumably they have some reason for doing so (apart from laziness). I'd ask them why they don't implement it.
- viraptor 11y agoSome of them, but not all. Many have a common issue of high-bits == low-bits. That's would require a very consistent and precise cosmic ray hitting many computers.
- MSRogers 11y agoEspecially seeing how the signature part is copied from other subkeys and pasted into place. Quite the magic rays.
- cyphar 11y agoI didn't notice the dodgy exponents. In that case, it's possible it was a broken keygen algorithm. But many of the others (small factors) are probably other errors in the chain (and a cousin comment has done some testing that appears to back this up).
- floodyberry- 11y agoPeople, such as the same nutjob who is doing it now: http://trilema.com/2015/full-disclosure-4096-rsa-key-in-the-strongset-factored/ http://trilema.com/2015/full-disclosure-4096-rsa-key-in-the-... Explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9561179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9561179