9 ms·

Sounds like they took the "roll your own and don't tell anyone how it works" approach. Security by obscurity is never security. History has shown that the open

• denysvitali 3y ago
  You can't easily put backdoors in cryptographic algorithms that can be audited
  • anonym29 3y ago
    ^ this post brought to you by RSA, ANSI, ISO, NIST, the NSA, and the authors of DUAL_EC_DRBG /s
    • gpderetta 3y ago
      ... Which iirc was immediately identified as suspicious during auditing.
      • a1369209993 3y ago
        And yet became a official standard anyway, and was occasionally actually used, despite the fact that is was obviously backdoored to anyone who knew anything about (elliptic-curve) cryptography. (It's literally a textbook-exercise leaky RNG, of the sort that you would find under "Exercise: create a elliptic-curve-based RNG that leaks seed bits within N bytes of random data." in a actual cryptography textbook.)
        • tptacek 3y ago
          You don't really need to understand elliptic curves to understand Dual EC. It's a public key RNG. The vulnerability is that there's a matching private key.
          • a1369209993 3y ago
            True, but my parenthetical was covering the opposite issue: it's possible to not realise DUAL_EC_DRBG is broken (rather than impossible to realise it) if your only knowledge of cryptography is, say, hash functions and stream ciphers (so you don't recognise public key cryptography from looking at it). It's unlikely, because DUAL_EC_DRBG is really obviously broken, but I wouldn't fault someone who knew nothing about elliptic-curve cryptography for missing it, even if they were familiar with other types of cryptography. (I would fault them for claiming that it's secure, rather than recognizing that they don't know enough to evaluate its security, but you can't conclude something's backdoored just from that.)
      • anonym29 3y ago
        The assertion I was refuting was that they couldn't be easily inserted into an audited library, not that they wouldn't be detected.
  • tptacek 3y ago
    You certainly can.
• stavros 3y ago
  The bigger issue here is that there's an intentional vulnerability.
• umvi 3y ago
  Obscurity should never replace security, but it can and does augment security by increasing the cost to even study the security.
• ok123456 3y ago
  It's more of intentionally reducing the keyspace when generating keys. You can use weakly generated keys with industry-standard encryption algorithms. When your 4096-bit key is only 32 bits, it doesn't matter how well-trusted the algorithm is.
  • tptacek 3y ago
    I just skimmed the paper but it looked to me like the key generation is the same in all profiles, but the TEA1 case has a key setup that compresses the generated key down to 32 bits.
  • jnwatson 3y ago
    The researchers found several problems. The backdoor seems intentional, but the others do not. They broke the TAA protocol.
• xyzzy4747 3y ago
  Security has many layers. Obscurity can be one of them.
  • barsonme 3y ago
    Obscurity can certainly be part of defense in depth, but it unequivocally does not make anything more (meaningfully) secure. For example, hiding the fact that your data is encrypted with AES doesn’t make an attacker any more likely to be able to break AES. Similarly, hiding the fact that you use a weak encryption algorithm doesn’t keep an attacker from breaking it.
• londons_explore 3y ago
  And yet this one lasted 30 years. That's far longer than most open encryption algorithms continue to be deemed secure. Obviously you can debate wether having it 'appear' secure for longer before someone publishes details of the flaw is more important or not...
  • nicce 3y ago
    > And yet this one lasted 30 years. Main goal of security through obscurity is the hindrance. Make it slower and harder to to detect possible vulnerabilities. So indeed, there is something to debate. But I guess it helps only against those with limited resources, not against nation states.
    • swells34 3y ago
      This is analogous to physical security doors. They are considered passive security, since they are a deterrent, and are rated by the numbers of hours they are expected to hold up against hand tools.
    • xmprt 3y ago
      Is it still true that nation states are at the forefront of innovation and the largest security threats? At least in the United States, I'd be surprised to learn that their best and brightest minds are working in three letter government agencies when they can work in industry for more money and less bureaucracy.
      • tptacek 3y ago
        Yes. Additionally, there are extensive public/private partnerships.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • londons_explore 3y ago
        Does one need the best and brightest minds to break crypto? Or does it just take a lot of full-time regular minds? Because the academic/opensource communities famously don't have many hours to dedicate to the cause.