It's not quite as egregious as someone purposely choosing the key. According to the write up on the Mozilla bugtracker there was a bug in the script used for there key generation ceremony which caused the bad certificates to be generated. Obviously completely unacceptable for a CA, but makes more sense than someone plucking 4 out of the air while generating a root cert.
Correct. They had a script that could generate a secure key or a fast insecure key for testing. The script generated both at the same time.
Human error was selecting the wrong output file and promoting it forward.
It's not at all the kind of thing you want to see in a reliable, secure, mature process... There shouldn't be a step where a human even makes a choice there.
And it's exactly the kind of thing most companies are doing, most of the time, more often than we would like.
An awful lot of the world runs on spit and bailing wire and things too easy to automate yet, and the parts that don't cost more.
It's not quite as egregious as someone purposely choosing the key. According to the write up on the Mozilla bugtracker there was a bug in the script used for there key generation ceremony which caused the bad certificates to be generated. Obviously completely unacceptable for a CA, but makes more sense than someone plucking 4 out of the air while generating a root cert.
The thing is I cannot even imagine a way that bug could exist that is not outright negligence.
A unit test becoming prod data? That’s really all I’ve got and that’s pretty unforgivable.
I've integrated with production APIs that tell the client to encrypt sensitive data using an IV consisting of 16 null bytes.
Some people just follow a spec and don't stop to think what that spec is supposed to accomplish.
It's easier to imagine if it was malicious.
Correct. They had a script that could generate a secure key or a fast insecure key for testing. The script generated both at the same time.
Human error was selecting the wrong output file and promoting it forward.
It's not at all the kind of thing you want to see in a reliable, secure, mature process... There shouldn't be a step where a human even makes a choice there.
And it's exactly the kind of thing most companies are doing, most of the time, more often than we would like.
An awful lot of the world runs on spit and bailing wire and things too easy to automate yet, and the parts that don't cost more.
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It was selected with a fair dice, guaranteed to be random! :)
One of those 4-sided ones! (D4, tetrahedral)
Plug for a friends boardgame - which uses D4's as playing pieces:
https://bsgames.ca/games/sinoda/
Haha, yeah, I love these dices; I needed all sorts of weird ones switching between World of Darkness systems and Cyberpunk 2020.
Ill take a look at the game, thank you!