Bug#864253: Please remove bcrypt- it has not been updated in 15 years, manpage is incorrect, and package is incorrectly named

2017-06-06 Thread Agustin Martin
On Mon, Jun 05, 2017 at 11:58:47AM -0600, Aaron Toponce wrote:
> Package: bcrypt
> Version: 1.1-8.1+b1
> 
> The bcrypt package is 15 years outdated, with no updates. The last update was
> 2002-09-13: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bcrypt/files/.
> 
> In addition, bug #700758 mentions that bcrypt does not use a secure form of
> encryption, in that it uses the Blowfish algorithm. Indeed, Blowfish is a
> 64-bit cipher, and is vulnerable to the Sweet32 Birthday attack. See
> https://sweet32.info/.

Hi, just one comment.

Because of that and other problems Debian bcrypt package is currently
decrypt-only, just in case someone has old bcrypt encrypted files. I used to
have some of those files flying around, but to be honest I did not need them
for some years now. 

Regards,

-- 
Agustin



Bug#864253: Please remove bcrypt- it has not been updated in 15 years, manpage is incorrect, and package is incorrectly named

2017-06-05 Thread Aaron Toponce
Package: bcrypt
Version: 1.1-8.1+b1

The bcrypt package is 15 years outdated, with no updates. The last update was
2002-09-13: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bcrypt/files/.

In addition, bug #700758 mentions that bcrypt does not use a secure form of
encryption, in that it uses the Blowfish algorithm. Indeed, Blowfish is a
64-bit cipher, and is vulnerable to the Sweet32 Birthday attack. See
https://sweet32.info/.

Further, it uses Blowfish in ECB mode (as bug #700758 mentions). ECB mode
retains structure of the file that it encrypts, and should never be used as a
serious mode of encryption.

Continuing, aside from using an ECB mode, the encryption is not authenticated
using a message authentication code (MAC). As such, the encrypted data is
subject to bit flipping attacks, replay attacks, and other vulnerabilities.

If that's not bad enough, the term `bcrypt' is actually a password hashing
function with a tunable parameter as a CPU cost. However, this package is not
doing password hashing, but instead doing only Blowfish encryption. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt versus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowfish_(cipher). Blowfish is not bcrypt, and
bcrypt is not Blowfish.

In the manpage, it provides http://www.counterpane.com/bfsh-koc.zip as a link
to download the original Blowfish sources, but that link redirects to
https://www.globalservices.bt.com/uk/en/products_category/security_and_risk_management.
Further, the domain to the email address of  is no
longer valid.

Due to the bugs:

* Using Blowfish
* Using ECB mode
* Not using authenticated encryption
* Manpage outdated
* Package incorrectly named (confusing with the password hashing alg.)
* Sources outdated

This package should just be dropped from the repositories.

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