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Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs

Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs

Posted Nov 12, 2021 3:14 UTC (Fri) by KJ7RRV (subscriber, #153595)
In reply to: Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs by tialaramex
Parent article: Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs

Is there a link to read more about the theoretical false positive? It sounds interesting, even if it's really nothing to worry about.


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Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs

Posted Nov 12, 2021 4:11 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

I found this blog post which describes the server putting a fixed value in part of the TLS 1.2 random nonce to indicate "I actually speak TLS 1.3, but I'm using TLS 1.2 because I think that you don't support TLS 1.3." There is a low but nonzero probability of a naive TLS 1.2 server happening to generate that exact value at random. A MitM cannot change this value because it would invalidate the key exchange. Since the portion of the nonce which is used for this purpose is 8 bytes, and there are only two specific values which can result in a false positive, the probability should be equivalent to the probability of generating a random 64-bit integer, and getting either of two specific, fixed values (i.e. 1 in 2^63 ≈ 1 in 9.2e18). While it is certainly possible that someone, somewhere has gotten this failure at some point in time, it is profoundly less likely than the network or the server experiencing an outage (nobody has that many nines), and so it can probably be neglected in practice.

Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs

Posted Nov 12, 2021 18:12 UTC (Fri) by KJ7RRV (subscriber, #153595) [Link]

Thank you!


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