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posted by n1 on Wednesday October 21 2015, @07:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-are-you,-hourly? dept.

Just recently, I moved my personal website to HTTPS, making sure to use a secure 2048-bit RSA key and TLS 1.2, and guarding against vulnerabilities such as POODLE and Logjam. It took some work, but not that much work, even for doing the research. Yet there are some people who just don't care.

Due to a new technique, 512-bit keys are now completely vulnerable for as little as $75.

The technique, which uses Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service, is described in a paper published last week titled Factoring as a Service .

[...] The researchers concluded that despite widespread awareness that 512-bit keys are highly susceptible to breaking, the message still hasn't adequately sunk in with many administrators. The researchers wrote:

512-bit RSA has been known to be insecure for at least fifteen years, but common knowledge of precisely how insecure has perhaps not kept pace with modern technology. We build a system capable of factoring a 512-bit RSA key reliably in under four hours. We then measure the impact of such a system by surveying the incidence of 512-bit RSA in our modern cryptographic infrastructure, and find a long tail of too-short public keys and export-grade cipher suites still in use in the wild. These numbers illustrate the challenges of keeping an aging Internet infrastructure up to date with even decades-old advances in cryptanalysis.

The article reports finding a significant number of sites that are still using 512-bit RSA keys to protect HTTPS, DNSSEC, ssh, e-mail (SMTP, POP3, and IMAP), and other services.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @05:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @05:00PM (#253290)

    "punch a fed" day