• 4am@lemmy.zip
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    17 hours ago

    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

    • Tehhund@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      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.

    • T. Hex@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      17 hours ago

      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 😂