Friday, September 08, 2006

Matasano refers to Bleichenbachers' recently published attack. Tremendously short comment:

Anything that does RSA with low exponent is likely attackable. And padding should always be OAEP. ;)
After all the Brouhaha surrounding the work on Apple wireless drivers, I'd like to pitch my two cents:
  • Who cares wether this is real or not ? The possibility of breaking NIC drivers (especially in multithreaded kernels) is real, and nobody should be surprised if this happens. Has anyone ever disassembled the pos drivers that come with every cheap electronic USB gadget ? I have my doubts that the QA for NIC drivers is a lot better
  • It seems we are not the only ones with a similar problem: http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/303.ps
In the above paper, Eric Filiol says he has broken E0, but does not give any description of the analysis - just a (significant) number of keys that lead to very long strings of zero's or to keystreams with a predefined hamming weight.

I am not decided on the paper yet - read it yesterday evening, jetlagged, over half a bottle of wine. This sort of publishing would be very easy for hash functions -- I would believe anyone that he can build secondary pre-images (or even pre-images) from MD5 if he can give me a string of input that hashes to "thequickbrownfox....".

Now, we just need stuff like that for bugs ;-)