On Tue, 30 Dec 2008 16:13:07 EST, Elazar Broad said: > And they should have listened then, it was only a matter of time > before someone fleshed out a practical attack, and that time is > now. Then again, I am sure there some ATM's out there still using > DES. How many time's do we need to prove Moore's law... Playing devil's advocate for a moment... And perhaps they *were* listening, but realized that security is about tradeoffs, and they balanced the cost of doing the upgrade back then against the chances that a team as technically and budget-wise prepared as this one, *and with nefarious intent*, would do something significantly drastic enough to dent their revenue stream. Read section 5.2 of the hashclash/rogue-ca paper. The victim CA is churning out an average of 1,000 certs in 3 days, let's say at $12 per. That's some $600K per year for just the weekends, not counting the Mon-Thurs span which is probably even higher (and why they targeted a weekend). So $2M per year or more. Who wants to place a bet that said CA will be selling *the same number* of certs every week, meaning they had *no* economic loss due to this hack, because their customers won't actually *see* the news article and give them a bad feeling about their CA? And with no actual loss, why spend the money to implement the change? Hint: It *isn't* just a matter of changing one line in a script to say 'sha1' instead of 'md5' - you *also* need to go back and look at all the certs you've issued already and figure out if they've been tweaked...
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