Re: Weakness in Social Security Numbers Is Found
On Jul 8, 2009, at 8:46 PM, d...@geer.org wrote: I don't honestly think that this is new, but even if it is, a 9-digit random number has a 44% chance of being a valid SSN (442 million issued to date). Different attack. What they are saying is that given date and place of birth - not normally considered particularly sensitive - they have a good chance of predicting *a particular person's* SSN. For untargetted attacks, broad statistics about the number of SSN's out there are fine. But much attention these days is on targetted attacks against "high value" individuals. It's in fact probably *easier* to find basic biographical information about date and place of birth of such individuals - you can often get much of it for, say, CEO's of public companies from their own brief bio's of their senior officers; scan newspapers for charity birthday events and you can get quite a bit more - than for a random member of the population. Now, whether this really buys you all that much over other ways of getting hold of SSN's is questionable - and in fact the researchers are quoted as saying it's more of a demonstration of principle than anything practical. BTW, 442 million SSN's have been issued, but how many are for people who have since died? For many attacks, you need one for a living victim, which lowers the probability. -- Jerry - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com
112-bit prime ECDLP solved
Hi all, We are pleased to announce that we have set a new record for the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) by solving it over a 112-bit finite field. The previous record was for a 109-bit prime field and dates back from October 2002. Our calculation was done on a cluster of more than 200 PlayStation 3 game consoles at the EPFL. See for more details our announcement at http://lacal.epfl.ch/page81774.html. Best regards, Joppe Bos - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com
Re: Weakness in Social Security Numbers Is Found
d...@geer.org wrote: I don't honestly think that this is new, but even if it is, a 9-digit random number has a 44% chance of being a valid SSN (442 million issued to date). I wonder if the UK NI numbers suffer from a similar problem. The look a little like this: AB 12 34 56 C Information on how they are strutured is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Insurance#National_Insurance_number However given we don't use the NI number in the UK like the SSN is abused in the US there isn't the same security risk in guessing them. Although the Wikipedia article claims they are sometimes used for identification I know I have never been asked for mine other than by an employer or suitably authorised government body how has a real need to know. -- Darren J Moffat - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com
