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Apple's "goto fail" bug is completely different: it was not a design flaw, but a merge error. Hanlon's razor applies sufficiently. But anyone with a basic unde

Apple's "goto fail" bug is completely different: it was not a design flaw, but a merge error. Hanlon's razor applies sufficiently. But anyone with a basic understanding of information security would know that keying by truncated MD5 is certainly a bad idea. This is not just stupidity. This is not accidental. This design not only flies in the face of everything you want from a cert store, but is so blatantly bad that surely more than one person at Kaspersky was in on it.

tptacek 10y ago
I don't know why you're operating from the presumption that most security people know anything at all about basic cryptography, because practically none of them do. Cryptography seems like it should be a general topic in information security, but it isn't; it's very much a specialist topic. This is far, far from the dumbest crypto bug I've seen in a security product. You're simply wrong about this. If you'll take a second to look at the "goto fail" threads on HN, by the way, you'll see people every bit as committed to the idea that "goto fail was an inside job" as you are to this bug being enemy action. Have you taken a second to even think about how this precise bug even makes sense as an implant? Hint: it does not make sense as an implant.
- jamesrom 10y ago
  > I don't know why you're operating from the presumption that most security people know anything at all about basic cryptography I don't know why you're operating from the presumption I'm talking about security people in general. I'm talking about the people at Kaspersky who were tasked with writing a SSL certificate store. I will also quote the bug report: "You don't have to be a cryptographer to understand a 32bit key is not enough to prevent brute-forcing a collision in seconds. In fact, producing a collision with any other certificate is trivial." > Have you taken a second to even think about how this precise bug even makes sense as an implant? Hint: it does not make sense as an implant. Hint: Pair this with a DNS spoof and you can pretend to be whatever website you want.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    First: generalist software developers muck with TLS all the time. There's a whole huge class of enterprise automation and management software that also does custom TLS. How good do you think that stuff is? Do you think the companies that churn this stuff out hire TLS experts to build those components? Of course they don't. Second: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13313794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13313794

tptacek 10y ago

I don't know why you're operating from the presumption that most security people know anything at all about basic cryptography, because practically none of them do. Cryptography seems like it should be a general topic in information security, but it isn't; it's very much a specialist topic. This is far, far from the dumbest crypto bug I've seen in a security product. You're simply wrong about this. If you'll take a second to look at the "goto fail" threads on HN, by the way, you'll see people every bit as committed to the idea that "goto fail was an inside job" as you are to this bug being enemy action. Have you taken a second to even think about how this precise bug even makes sense as an implant? Hint: it does not make sense as an implant.

jamesrom 10y ago
> I don't know why you're operating from the presumption that most security people know anything at all about basic cryptography I don't know why you're operating from the presumption I'm talking about security people in general. I'm talking about the people at Kaspersky who were tasked with writing a SSL certificate store. I will also quote the bug report: "You don't have to be a cryptographer to understand a 32bit key is not enough to prevent brute-forcing a collision in seconds. In fact, producing a collision with any other certificate is trivial." > Have you taken a second to even think about how this precise bug even makes sense as an implant? Hint: it does not make sense as an implant. Hint: Pair this with a DNS spoof and you can pretend to be whatever website you want.
- tptacek 10y ago
  First: generalist software developers muck with TLS all the time. There's a whole huge class of enterprise automation and management software that also does custom TLS. How good do you think that stuff is? Do you think the companies that churn this stuff out hire TLS experts to build those components? Of course they don't. Second: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13313794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13313794