Submitted 3 months ago by GreenEngineering3475@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Wow, props to Castellucci for being a stand up person and not using their discovery to control or mess with tens of thousands of people’s power supply. And props to GivEnergy for not turning around and suing them after they reported finding the issue.
This could have gone badly in either direction, but we lucked out that this Castellucci seems to be an excellent and conscientious citizen.
How in the fuck do you even coax software into using a key like that? Did someone just say “yeah just use the smallest size possible, that’ll be okay” and then just like not care?
In an email, a GivEnergy representative reinforced Castellucci’s assessment, writing:
In this case, the problematic encryption approach was picked up via a 3rd party library many years ago, when we were a tiny startup company with only 2, fairly junior software developers & limited experience. Their assumption at the time was that because this encryption was available within the library, it was safe to use. This approach was passed through the intervening years and this part of the codebase was not changed significantly since implementation (so hadn't passed through the review of the more experienced team we now have in place).
So, it sounds like they don’t have regular security audits, because that’s something that would absolutely get flagged by any halfway competent sec team.
Yet another reminder that trust should be earned.
Because cryptography is a specialized knowledge. Most curriculums doesn’t even include cryptography as core topic in their Computer Science degree. You can have a look of the MIT’s computer science curriculum. Cryptography is instead embedded in the elective class of Fundementals of Computer Security (6.1600). That’s also why DevSecOps instead of the previous DevOps. It’s just simply boils down teaching and learning cryptography is hard. It’s still too early to expect a typical dev to understand how to implement cryptograhy, even with good library. Most doesn’t know compression and encryption doesn’t mix well. Nor they understand the importance of randomness and never use the same nounce twice. Crypto lib devs who understands crypto add big scary warnings yet someone will mess something up.
Still, I will strongly support academics adding basic cryptography knowledge to their curriculum, like common algoritms, key lengths, future threats, and how fast the security landscape is moving, just for the sake of the future of cyber security.
Eh, I disagree. Cryptography really isn’t something your average software engineer needs to know about, as long as they understand that you should never roll your own crypto. If you teach it in school, most students will forget the details and potentially just remember some now-insecure details from their classes.
Instead, we should be pushing for more frequent security audits. Any halfway decent security audit would catch this, and probably a bunch of other issues they have as well. Expect that from any org with revenue above some level.
This was an incredibly interesting article.
Right? I feel like ars technica has been on a roll this year
I subbed because I’ve really enjoyed their content for the past few years
Yet another reason to never connect your devices to the cloud.
You know, at least when I’ve had to generate RSA keys for SSH, it seems like the highest I can possibly do is 4096. Just makes me wonder why you can’t generate a key of any links that’s a multiple of 1024. Such as, what if I wanted a 20,480 bit key?
Current recommendation is to stop using RSA in new deployments altogether. ECC is preferred now, and the major programs (OpenTLS, OpenSSH, etc.) support it.
Thats ECDSA correct? Or is that something different?
I believe you can with openssl, it will take lots of time both generating and using a key. Think you sign simething with that key, the the other party is using a low end device. He might take few mintues just to verify the signature. The drawbacks just outweight the benefits.
catloaf@lemm.ee 3 months ago
tl;dr: hacker (the good kind) exploits weak encryption key to gain access to the utility’s management system. Because you too were probably wondering how key length and power generation could possibly be related.