Comment by maeln
13 hours ago
eMudhra explanation : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449#c11
Kind of hard to understand how a bug would have generated a second pair of key so bad, and how would human would have ended up using them. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, but sometimes you wonder.
Given the usefulness of this to anybody who knew about it between the ceremony and now - assume malice.
If I was to leak a private key for malicious use, I would leak a good key that only I know.
And an equal amount of stupidity in the whole ecosystem, apparently there are no "unit-tests" for trivial failure modes, like 8 bits of entropy, before adding a CA to the trusted list.
What next, googling the public key finds a 2 year old pastebin with the private key?
Even just a human glancing at the private key should do it.
Don't they even test script changes on a staging server? How could there be such a script error in production that was not caught in testing/staging?
This sounds very like a fundamental organization error, not an innocent whoopsie. It should lead to a permanent ban of the organization.
Well humans should NOT glance at private keys! That is the whole point of HSMs!
7 replies →
Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The reverse is also true:
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
Never assume stupidity for what can adequately be explained by profitable malice.
Never assume unprofitable malice for what can adequately be explained by stupidity.