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Google confirms critical Android crypto flaw used in Bitcoin heist
- marshray 13y agoI thought OpenSSL's default code already pulled from /dev/[u]random at initialization?
- Afforess 13y agoThe Official Sun/Oracle JDK SecureRandom class already pulls from /dev/random. The Android class does not.
- e12e 13y agoBut they only copied the API, remember. Not the implementation... ;-)
- gsibble 13y agoLarry Ellison is ROFLing right now.
- kolinko 13y agowhere does it pull from?
- autotravis 13y agohttp://xkcd.com/221/ http://xkcd.com/221/
- gsibble 13y agoYeah......that looks like an easy fix o_O
- flyt 13y agoAnd now we simply wait for cell carriers/handset manufacturers to push out updates for all the handsets in the field.
- enraged_camel 13y agoYep. Everyone who normally pretends that Android fragmentation is "not that big a deal" is going to squirm.
- jmomo 13y agoThis is why I use Cyanogenmod. I get better support from a bunch of unpaid yahoos who like to dork around with phones than from the carriers and handset manufactures. I am willing to bet Cyanogenmod will have a fix out in days, if not hours. This goes for other ROMs like Paranoid too. I refuse to buy hardware which isn't supported by the open-source community, such as Cyanogen. If I don't 0wn it, I don't own it.
- rednukleus 13y agoI know, right? Things would be so much better if the dominant OS was a closed platform, and only ran on hardware made by the same company and only ran apps purchased though a tightly controlled store run by the same company. Of course then they could shut out other service providers such as maps and cloud services, and basically wreck the industry for almost everyone except themselves, but at least we would get timely updates.
- kmfrk 13y agoIt's almost as if decisions have trade-offs.
- melling 13y agoWho said that it had to be one of two models? Microsoft Windows works much the same way Android does by running on lots of vendor hardware. People don't have to wait for Dell to push out updates, for example.
- bigdubs 13y agoComputers are also not cell phones, and Dell doesn't want to have as tight control over the operating system as carriers / phone makers.
- gsibble 13y agoI'm actually shocked that someone used a zero-day Android exploit to steal $5,700 of BTC. Couldn't they have sold it for significantly more on the black market?
- e12e 13y agoWe don't really know that. The other obvious implication would be that we now might need new/expanded openssl/ssh key blacklists, for keys generated on Android devices.
- cstavish 13y agoIt's possible that the exploit was used previously and the incident went unreported.
- zorpner 13y agoIt may not have been identified specifically as an Android exploit -- there are people (I used to be one of them, though I wouldn't have used the result to exploit wallets) who constantly run crypto attacks on transactions in the blockchain to identify weak wallet keys. The person who stole the BTC probably automated the attack, left it running against the blockchain, and never even knew what the real vulnerability was.
- qnr 13y agoThey didn't use an Android exploit specifically, they simply scanned the blockchain for vulnerable private keys. They probably didn't even know that Android was the culprit - it could be hardware wallet, a buggy homebrew client or whatever.
- marshray 13y agoHas anyone looked to see if the NSA Secure Android project has this bug?
- gcb0 13y agoirony of the month: anyone NOT following the age old advice about not implementing your own crypto would have been spared from this.
- lvh 13y agoWhy? This is a failure of the CSPRNG. What "not implementing your own crypto" usually means is trying to cobble together primitives like AES, RSA, and some mode of operation (and, if you're lucky, there's a MAC algorithm in there too), which would still probably have been horribly broken in some way. That's completely orthogonal to this issue. Are you insinuating that explicitly seeding the CSPRNG with information from the OS' CSPRNG is somehow a bad thing, or that it is frowned upon, or that it constitutes "implementing your own crypto"?
- thirsteh 13y agoIndeed. The irony is that anyone following that (good) advice were affected by this.
- plasma 13y agoWhy does the blog post also suggest /dev/random? I thought urandom should only be used for crypto.
- VikingCoder 13y agoHow much would a good hardware RNG cost, and when can we have a phone with one that can run Cyanogenmod?