I've factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority from the 90s

ggm

The cost per bit is a doubling in time. So factoring a 512 RSA, compared to a 1024 RSA is significantly cheaper. The OP used contemporary hardware to do this. so, we'd have to ask if the orders of magnitude improvement in tech (QC aside) would permit 1024 in tractable time. I tend to no, but I appreciate there are other points of view. And of course, the belief that one day we can apply Shor with success exists. At which point the question is moot. Not that Shor does not itself demand significantly more stable gates, per extra bit of RSA. I always wonder why people don't look at the trend line in stable QuBits and the trendline in cost of RSA. Do the lines intersect? Remember, Shor is like a coded gate level algorithm expressed as sequences of interconnected stable QuBits. So, if you double the cost for each RSA bit you add, its not "nothing" in terms of how you wire the rig. (not a cryptographer, or a QC person so I expect to be hit by a very cold but stable quantum clue-by-four shortly. Maybe they have to hit me 1 million times, to confirm I'm hit. Its statistics.)

goalieca

Basically 2 days on a consumer GPU to crack a 512 bit cert. The thing is much of the traffic back then did not use ephemeral keys. Most of it wasn't even encrypted at all! But about a decade later, it became normal to encrypt everything. I do wonder which governments around the world are just waiting to crack anonymous political speech by recording and saving for later when decryption can happen.

pvillano

That SSL report with four different automatic 'F's is an amazing punchline

mitxela

> While I haven’t verified this LLM output is entirely trustworthy, it looks pretty plausible. It's essential that you do, because generating pretty plausible outputs is an LLM's bread and butter. Otherwise, only the one that you actually tested should be expected to be correct.

63

A bit unfortunate that so many of the interesting bits were left to ai. I would've enjoyed some commentary on why the custom TLS implementation was necessary. Oh well. Update: found this explanation in a comment at the top of the (surprisingly short) Go file in the linked repo: The target client is Netscape Communicator 4.51 (both the 40-bit export build and the 128-bit US build) with its clock set to the year 2000. Go's crypto/tls cannot help: it dropped SSLv3 in Go 1.14, never accepted the SSLv2-compatible ClientHello that Netscape 4 sends, and never had RC4-MD5 or the 40-bit export suites. So this file carries its own tiny SSLv3 server-side implementation on top of stdlib primitives (RSA PKCS#1 v1.5, RC4, DES, 3DES, MD5, SHA-1). The server key is 512-bit RSA so that export clients can encrypt the premaster secret to it directly, without a ServerKeyExchange.

excalibur

> Assuming you’re somehow running Netscape 4.51 with a clock set before E-Certify roots expired on 2003-10-16, you can use these private keys to issue certificates. This describes zero people on the planet… except for this VM I set up. The planet has a lot of people.

Retr0id

I went down the same line of thought in the past! But I guess I was less thorough with my search, I never found any certs that small.

andytratt

lol nice job Marc Andreesen

rootsudo

This is so cool, I love reverse archeology of this, having another understanding of something functional but invisible from my childhood to finally understand it and then at a later now where we can break it. So cool!

forgotmypw17

This is amazing news for people building hyper-compatible websites!

ranger_danger

How was it actually factored though? Where is the code for that? How was the private key created and how are the new certs issued?

jrmg

In the 90s, how long did people expect it would be until consumer computer hardware would be able to do this so quickly?