Security quotes of the week
“We wouldn’t share this with Google for even $1 million,” says [Vupen's Chaouki] Bekrar. “We don’t want to give them any knowledge that can help them in fixing this exploit or other similar exploits. We want to keep this for our customers.”
-- Forbes
on security research firms selling exploits to governments
Those customers, after all, don’t aim to fix Google’s security bugs or those of any other commercial software vendor. They’re government agencies who purchase such “zero-day” exploits, or hacking techniques that use undisclosed flaws in software, with the explicit intention of invading or disrupting the computers and phones of crime suspects and intelligence targets.
The more complicated answer is that many bad things can happen if your RNG breaks down, and some are harder to deal with than others.
-- Matthew
Green
In the rest of this post I'm going to talk about this, and give a few potential mitigations. I want to stress that this post is mostly a thought-exercise. Please do not re-engineer OpenSSL around any of the 'advice' I give herein (I'm looking at you, Dan Kaminsky), and if you do follow any of my advice, understand the following:
When it all goes terribly wrong, I'll quietly take down this post and pretend I never wrote it.
[An] otherwise uninteresting article on Internet threats to public infrastructure contains this paragraph:
-- Bruce
SchneierAt a closed-door briefing, the senators were shown how a power company employee could derail the New York City electrical grid by clicking on an e-mail attachment sent by a hacker, and how an attack during a heat wave could have a cascading impact that would lead to deaths and cost the nation billions of dollars.Why isn't the obvious solution to this to take those critical electrical grid computers off the public Internet?