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NSA Backdoor Key from Lotus-Notes (1997)
- spzb 3y agoDupe (2002!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859581 With no context, I don't know why this is front page news today. Am I missing something?
- nonrandomstring 3y agoI think a Microsoft coder recently came clean about some pretty funky stuff from the 90s and 00's. Hope I didn't hallucinate that.
- ranting-moth 3y agoLink?
- qingcharles 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjkBAl84PJs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjkBAl84PJs
- ranting-moth 3y agoThanks!
- EvanAnderson 3y agoI feel like you might be talking about Dave Plummer: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage He recently have a good talk at VCF, too: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ig_5syuWUh0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ig_5syuWUh0
- baby 3y agoAre you asking what reposts are?
- ollemasle 3y agoAdding the date in the HN title would be better (it is not present in the article)
- spzb 3y agoNo. I'm pointing out that (a) it's not marked as being from 2002 and someone would therefore assume it was some newly discovered backdoor and (b) there's no context or commentary as to why it is relevant in 2023. Also, on closer inspection the story is from 1997 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.52.html#subj1 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/19.52.html#subj1
- boffinAudio 3y agoI'd wager that its still relevant today because the NSA is still the worlds greatest wholesale violator of human rights, at massive scale, and literally nothing effective has been done about this situation - we are still tolerating this repression, because we don't see it and simply don't care enough about the human rights violations, as a people, to reign in this out of control agency. Bringing these articles to light is of great utility to those of us who do not consider the NSA state of affairs to be, in any way, tolerable.
- acdha 3y ago> the NSA is still the worlds greatest wholesale violator of human rights, at massive scale, and literally nothing effective has been done about this situation - we are still tolerating this repression I don’t approve of their actions but turning the hyperbole up to 11 doesn’t help. There are millions of people in China who’d love to be only that repressed, for example.
- boffinAudio 3y agoYou can always rely on an American to bust out the China hate train when challenged on the facts of their own empires crimes .. Did you miss the fact that the NSA is literally violating the human rights of billions of people (including the Chinese), while China in the meantime has brought a billion people out of poverty conditions into their new middle class? >There are millions of people in China who’d love to be only that repressed, for example I seriously doubt you understand the nature of this fallacy. Meanwhile, how many families live under a broken bridge in the USA, just because Mom got cancer? Those 1,000 black-ops CIA sites around the world - you know for sure what they are being used for, eh? No torture? Seriously, get a grip. The moral authority you claim is a fallacy.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThis would be a repost rather than a dupe. HN considers dupes to be stories with significant discussion repeated within a year. (Items with little or no discussion can be resubmitted a few times.) Stories reshared after a year are reposts, and are perfectly fine, though its appreciated to have the item's original publication year included in the title. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312416> <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lelandfe 3y agoGood ole' "NOBUS." More fun NSA fumbles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
- kmeisthax 3y agoThis and the Clipper Chip aren't NOBUS. The NSA doesn't want you to know that the cryptosystem has law-enforcement access capability. The FBI doesn't care if you know as the kinds of criminals they are attacking don't do OPSEC.
- sneak 3y agoNOBUS isn't just intentional vulnerabilities, it's any vulnerability assumed to only be exploitable by US IC, whether engineered or otherwise. I think these qualify.
- rvnx 3y agoWell, the article mentions backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG mostly targeting TLS/SSL communications, now we have Cloudflare, a much more scalable solution
- tptacek 3y agoDual EC is sort of the archetypical NOBUS backdoor.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Quentincestino 3y ago[flagged]
- denysvitali 3y agoYou probably meant: https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
- gregw2 3y agoIt’s worth reading Ray Ozzie’s (Lotus Notes creator)’s comment on this from a HN 2013 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189 Before the software was released, Ray Ozzie and Kauffman openly described what they were doing at an RSA conference. This was not a secret back door. It was compliance with export controls everybody in the industry dealt with. Also worth reading barrkel’s comment a couple comments down…
- ethbr1 3y agoFor people younger than ~37, I'd remind them that crypto before 2000, especially in shipped commercial products, was playing under substantially different government restrictions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars Effectively and in short, you were prohibited by the US government from shipping strong encryption in any internationally distributed product. Which generally meant everything commercial. Despite open source implementations of strong encryption existing (e.g. PGP et al.). Now, no one bats an eye if you ship the most secure crypto you want. Then, it was a coin flip as to whether you'd feel the full weight of the US government legal apparatus. It was a crazy, schizophrenic time.
- bo1024 3y ago> It was a crazy, schizophrenic time. Or, we are currently experiencing a brief oasis of freedom in between extended periods of encryption lockdowns and controls.
- Jerrrry 3y agoYup, networks with a neuron count above a certain threshold (2+T?) will likely be on the IDAR restriction list again.
- SkyMarshal 3y agoWhat’s a neuron count?
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2002) Some previous discussions all mentioning Lotus Notes in the title: 4 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859581 8 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291404 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21859581 - Dec 2019 (87 comments) NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291404 - March 2015 (51 comments) NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5846189 - June 2013 (85 comments)
- agazso 3y agoI wonder how difficult would it be to brute force the private key for an RSA 760 bit public key from 1998. Does anyone know?
- panki27 3y agoAlways depends on what resources you have (compute, time). It's possible, but not easy. https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/1982 https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/1982
- 15457345234 3y agoOddly specific question, something in particular on your mind?
- cmeacham98 3y agoPresumably they are referring to the 760 bit RSA key this entire post is about.
- 15457345234 3y agoBut the header talks about a 64 bit key? I'm a bit lost actually. Edit: Okay, I see it now. 64 bits of cipher of which 24 bits of that cipher are set to a value derived from a 760 bit pubkey.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_numbers gives some pointers. Specifically, the latter describes a 768 bit key being factored "on December 12, 2009, over the span of two years", with CPU time that "amounted approximately to the equivalent of almost 2000 years of computing on a single-core 2.2 GHz AMD Opteron-based computer". Later, in 2019, a 795 bit key was factored with CPU time that "amounted to approximately 900 core-years on a 2.1 GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6130 CPU. Compared to the factorization of RSA-768, the authors estimate that better algorithms sped their calculations by a factor of 3–4 and faster computers sped their calculation by a factor of 1.25–1.67." So assuming the better algorithms transfer to smaller numbers, someone who knows how to use them (factoring big numbers seems significantly harder than just running CADO-NFS and pointing it at a number and a cluster) could probably do it in a couple months on a couple dozen modern machines. For example, using the "795-bit computations should be 2.25 times harder than 768-bit computations" from the publication accompanying the second factorization, we could assume 900/2.25 = 400 Core-years of the Xeon reference CPU (which is 6 years old by now) would be needed to break the smaller key with the modern software. Two dozen servers with 64 equivalently strong cores each would need slightly over 3 months. Not something a hobbyist would want to afford just for fun, but something that even a company with a moderate financial interest in doing could easily do, provided they had people capable of understanding and replicating this work.
- dartvox 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thesuitonym 3y agoIt's amazing to me that the folks at the NSA had enough self-reflection to see that this is Big Brother behavior, but not enough to realize why that's a bad thing.
- masfuerte 3y agoI'd guess that was snark from the Lotus engineer who embedded it.
- w1nst0nsm1th 3y agoThe Lotus engineer embedded it, but was he the guy who created the key ?
- w1nst0nsm1th 3y agoThe 'Big Brother' thing doesn't shock me, I know about it for some time now. At least you can still believe a modicum they maybe have good intentions... You know, protecting us from bad guys or something... But the 'MiniTruth' thing... Wow,just wow... Context: The Ministry Of Truth in the 1984 novel is the service dedicated to propaganda, in which the whole society is drowned. Everything about the society they live in is a lie... It just blows away any hope of good intention from their part. The last time I read about something so cynic, suggesting so much contempt for the people they pretend to serve, with such carelessness, is when it was revealed que FTX internal chatroom was called 'Wirefraud'.
- consoomer 3y agoWasn't the original backdoor in a code example the NSA provided to companies interested in using cryptography? They gave an example seed or whatever, and most companies copy/pasted it instead of generating their own primes, so the NSA could break it trivially. My memory around this is fuzzy and I can't seem to find the original source.
- leoh 3y agoRelated: https://github.com/goshacmd/nsa_panel https://github.com/goshacmd/nsa_panel
- MaintenanceMode 3y agoNow with the cloud none of this is necessary. With data at rest laws, all our email older than six months is open game.
- 93po 3y agoi googled this and didnt see any obvious results as to what the laws are for a company like google to provide access to their data at rest to government agencies without a warrant/NSL