Entries Tagged "RSA"

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Details of the RSA Hack

We finally have some, even though the company isn’t talking:

So just how well crafted was the e-mail that got RSA hacked? Not very, judging by what F-Secure found.

The attackers spoofed the e-mail to make it appear to come from a “web master” at Beyond.com, a job-seeking and recruiting site. Inside the e-mail, there was just one line of text: “I forward this file to you for review. Please open and view it.” This was apparently enough to get the intruders the keys to RSAs kingdom.

F-Secure produced a brief video showing what happened if the recipient clicked on the attachment. An Excel spreadsheet opened, which was completely blank except for an “X” that appeared in the first box of the spreadsheet. The “X” was the only visible sign that there was an embedded Flash exploit in the spreadsheet. When the spreadsheet opened, Excel triggered the Flash exploit to activate, which then dropped the backdoor—in this case a backdoor known as Poison Ivy—onto the system.

Poison Ivy would then reach out to a command-and-control server that the attackers controlled at good.mincesur.com, a domain that F-Secure says has been used in other espionage attacks, giving the attackers remote access to the infected computer at EMC. From there, they were able to reach the systems and data they were ultimately after.

F-Secure notes that neither the phishing e-mail nor the backdoor it dropped onto systems were advanced, although the zero-day Flash exploit it used to drop the backdoor was advanced.

Posted on August 30, 2011 at 6:25 AM • View Comments

RSA Security, Inc Hacked

The company, not the algorithm. Here’s the corporate spin.

Our investigation has led us to believe that the attack is in the category of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT). Our investigation also revealed that the attack resulted in certain information being extracted from RSA’s systems. Some of that information is specifically related to RSA’s SecurID two-factor authentication products. While at this time we are confident that the information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any of our RSA SecurID customers, this information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack. We are very actively communicating this situation to RSA customers and providing immediate steps for them to take to strengthen their SecurID implementations.

Here are news articles. The worry is that source code to the company’s SecurID two-factor authentication product was stolen, which would possibly allow hackers to reverse-engineer or otherwise break the system. It’s hard to make any assessments about whether this is possible or likely without knowing 1) how SecurID’s cryptography works, and 2) exactly what was stolen from the company’s servers. We do not know either, and the corporate spin is as short on details as it is long on reassurances.

RSA Data Security, Inc. is probably pretty screwed if SecurID is compromised. Those hardware tokens have no upgrade path, and would have to be replaced. How many of the company’s customers will replace them with competitors’ tokens. Probably a bunch. Hence, it’s in RSA’s best interest for their customers to forget this incident as quickly as possible.

There seems to be two likely scenarios if the attackers have compromised SecurID. One, they are a sophisticated organization who wants the information for a specific purpose. The attackers actually are on RSA’s side in the public-relations spin, and we’re unlikely to see widespread use of this information. Or two, they stole the stuff for conventional criminal purposes and will sell it. In that case, we’re likely to know pretty quickly.

Again, without detailed information—or at least an impartial assessment—it’s impossible to make any recommendations. Security is all about trust, and when trust is lost there is no security. User’s of SecurID trusted RSA Data Security, Inc. to protect the secrets necessary to secure that system. To the extent they did not, the company has lost its customers’ trust.

Posted on March 21, 2011 at 6:52 AM • View Comments

768-bit Number Factored

News:

On December 12, 2009, we factored the 768-bit, 232-digit number RSA-768 by the number field sieve. The number RSA-768 was taken from the now obsolete RSA Challenge list as a representative 768-bit RSA modulus. This result is a record for factoring general integers. Factoring a 1024-bit RSA modulus would be about a thousand times harder, and a 768-bit RSA modulus is several thousands times harder to factor than a 512-bit one. Because the first factorization of a 512-bit RSA modulus was reported only a decade ago it is not unreasonable to expect that 1024-bit RSA moduli can be factored well within the next decade by an academic effort such as ours…. Thus, it would be prudent to phase out usage of 1024-bit RSA within the next three to four years.

[…]

Our computation required more than 1020 operations. With the equivalent of almost 2000 years of computing on a single core 2.2GHz AMD Opteron, on the order of 267 instructions were carried out. The overall effort is sufficiently low that even for short-term protection of data of little value, 768-bit RSA moduli can no longer be recommended.

News articles.

Posted on January 11, 2010 at 8:00 AM • View Comments

Texas Instruments Signing Keys Broken

Texas Instruments’ calculators use RSA digital signatures to authenticate any updates to their operating system. Unfortunately, their signing keys are too short: 512-bits. Earlier this month, a collaborative effort factored the moduli and published the private keys. Texas Instruments responded by threatening websites that published the keys with the DMCA, but it’s too late.

So far, we have the operating-system signing keys for the TI-92+, TI-73, TI-89, TI-83+/TI-83+ Silver Edition, Voyage 200, TI-89 Titanium, and the TI-84+/TI-84 Silver Edition, and the date-stamp signing key for the TI-73, Explorer, TI-83 Plus, TI-83 Silver Edition, TI-84 Plus, TI-84 Silver Edition, TI-89, TI-89 Titanium, TI-92 Plus, and the Voyage 200.

Moral: Don’t assume that if your application is obscure, or if there’s no obvious financial incentive for doing so, that your cryptography won’t be broken if you use too-short keys.

Posted on September 25, 2009 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

The Doghouse: Singularics

This is priceless:

Our advances in Prime Number Theory have led to a new branch of mathematics called Neutronics. Neutronic functions make possible for the first time the ability to analyze regions of mathematics commonly thought to be undefined, such as the point where one is divided by zero. In short, we have developed a new way to analyze the undefined point at the singularity which appears throughout higher mathematics.

This new analytic technique has given us profound insight into the way that prime numbers are distributed throughout the integers. According to RSA’s website, there are over 1 billion licensed instances of RSA public-key encryption in use in the world today. Each of these instances of the prime number based RSA algorithm can now be deciphered using Neutronic analysis. Unlike RSA, Neutronic Encryption is not based on two large prime numbers but rather on the Neutronic forces that govern the distribution of the primes themselves. The encryption that results from Singularic’s Neutronic public-key algorithm is theoretically impossible to break.

You’d think that anyone who claims to be able to decrypt RSA at the key lengths in use today would, maybe, um, demonstrate that at least once. Otherwise, this can all be safely ignored as snake oil.

The founder and CTO also claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis, if you care to wade through the 63-page paper.

EDITED TO ADD (3/30): The CTO has responded to me.

Posted on February 25, 2009 at 2:00 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.