Comment by zkmon
9 hours ago
Great. The technology has progressed enough to kill the existing technologies. It's like the fish in a pool creating a shark that eats away all the fish while the fish proudly announce that their great creation (shark) as the frontier progress for their fish race.
Here a CA derived a secret key from the number 4.
If you think "that's weird to see such a small number in key generation" than you're one step ahead of whoever generated that key.
Unfortunately, unlike with RSA, small primes are not apparent in elliptic cryptography.
Oh my God it's literally this XKCD https://xkcd.com/221/
They should have upgraded to 5 (see today's xkcd alt text https://xkcd.com/3314/ )
> Here a CA derived a secret key from the number 4
https://xkcd.com/221/
RFC 1149.5 FTW
Nor small composites, apparently.
The eMudhra CA compromises had nothing to do with LLMs? But I love the vibes.
Agents have dramatically increased the ability to poke at every single surface out there. I would be surprised if the researcher who found this wasn't assisted by a llm.
The researcher in question has publicly stated[0] that he wanted to try Google's paranoid_crypto tool[1], so he ran it on some roots as a quick proof-of-concept, and the first thing that happened was that it detected these intermediates. He also states he's been running a lot of certificate linters so this was just the next logical step I guess.
[0]: https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-polic...
[1]: https://github.com/google/paranoid_crypto
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> It's like the fish in a pool creating a shark
What a weird comparison...
This is basically the whole idea of the novel War with the Newts
Create the problem, sell the solution
What are you talking about?