5 ms·
No doubt various three-letter agencies are having a field-day with this right now. Hopefully a robin-hood type will reverse-engineer the blob and post a perman
by digler999 10y ago
No doubt various three-letter agencies are having a field-day with this right now.
Hopefully a robin-hood type will reverse-engineer the blob and post a permanent fix to disable this thing before a more nefarious person/group uses it to devastate the PC landscape with something even worse than bitlocker.
- paulmd 10y agoIt's impossible to "reverse-engineer" a cryptographic signature. Properly implemented (and you can bet that Intel has had time to finalize this) it's computationally insurmountable.
- Dylan16807 10y agoNot the signature, the payload. It's very complex. I guarantee there are bugs.
- joe_the_user 10y agoIndeed, the blob can be reverse engineered. Even more, an unbreakable signature can have it's private key stolen by hacking, by agencies inserting personnel into the companies, by agencies blackmailing key personnel and by agencies compelling the companies legally or ex-legally to hand them their keys.
- zeta0134 10y agoReally, if someone has gone to the trouble of working out an exploit for Intel ME, the most ironic thing they could pull off would be to use that very exploit against Intel's own systems to steal their key, use it to patch the bugs, and release the patch to the world.
- Bartweiss 10y agoIt'd be a spectacular successor to that router-patching virus that made the rounds a while back.
- digler999 10y agojust like how DVD Encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System) was never reverse engineered because the key was too difficult to crack ?
- redcap 10y agoCSS is only 40 bits, which is ridiculously easy to crack. 56-bit DES keys are pretty unsafe these days, so you want at least 128 bits if you're talking private keys. If it's using 2048-bit RSA, that's perhaps equivalent to a 256-bit private key. So entirely different ballpark to CSS.
- aaronmdjones 10y agoWrong. 2048-bit RSA has an effective security level of approximately 112 bits, just like 3-DES. If you want 256 bits of security, you go all the way up to 15360-bit RSA. That's why Elliptic Curve systems are so attractive: they involve operations that are more costly per-bit, but the required key sizes to meet a security level are much less. Ofcourse, Elliptic Curve Cryptography as specified by NIST has its own downsides (e.g. the 3 most common curves, prime256v1, secp384r1, and secp521r1 (128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits of security respectively) have constants that were chosen arbitrarily by NSA with no explanation).
- rthomas6 10y agoThough when the NSA has done things like this in the past, we've found their choices prevented implementation weaknesses that weren't found (by anyone else) for several more years.
- Bartweiss 10y agoCan you follow up on that? I've never heard that story and I'm really curious. On the narrower point, though, it's been shown that Dual_EC_DRBG is broken, and that the NSA values compromised the implementation instead of strengthening it.
- rpgmaker 10y agoIt also reminds me of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/business/dealbook/china-fairchild-semiconductor-bid-rejected.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/business/dealbook/china-fa...