One of the orgs that does TLS infrastructure was found to have used 4, a number from Sesame Street, as a private key on a TLS cert that was used to sign other certs.
I originally thought nobody would try brute forcing simple keys like this, but then the person who found the vulnerability did it so I bet other people have done it. It’s less “gee hope this works” and more “If someone screwed up there key generation this might work,” and screwing up key generation is a known problem. Rare, but it does happen as this case demonstrates.
Almost assuredly someone is brute forcing all single-byte keys. In fact the private key equal to 4 is a single-bit, or “one hot” key, so an attacker could have found it by brute-forcing 384 different keys 😂
It’s a different thingymajigger.
One of the orgs that does TLS infrastructure was found to have used 4, a number from Sesame Street, as a private key on a TLS cert that was used to sign other certs.
Just to add. Those private keys are a 85 to 170 digits random number.
A very central company whose security the entire internet depends on picked 00000000000…0000004.
I can’t tell if it’s like, completely awful or kind of awesome. I mean, no one brute-forces private key space one bit at a time, do they?
Hey America’s nuclear launch code was eight zeros (“00000000”) at some point in the 1960s; technically we’ve survived worse
I originally thought nobody would try brute forcing simple keys like this, but then the person who found the vulnerability did it so I bet other people have done it. It’s less “gee hope this works” and more “If someone screwed up there key generation this might work,” and screwing up key generation is a known problem. Rare, but it does happen as this case demonstrates.
Almost assuredly someone is brute forcing all single-byte keys. In fact the private key equal to 4 is a single-bit, or “one hot” key, so an attacker could have found it by brute-forcing 384 different keys 😂