Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Ben Laurie
On 2 July 2010 13:19, Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=25670channel=Briefingssection=Microprocessors Tuesday, June 29, 2010 Nanoscale Random Number Circuit to Secure Future Chips Intel unveils a circuit that can pump out

Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Richard Salz
Have they forgotten the enormous amount of suspicion last time they tried this? More likely they're expecting everyone else to have forgotten about being suspicious. /r$ -- STSM, WebSphere Appliance Architect https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/soma/

Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Peter Gutmann
Ben Laurie b...@google.com writes: On 2 July 2010 13:19, Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=25670channel=Briefingssection=Microprocessors Tuesday, June 29, 2010 Nanoscale Random Number Circuit to Secure Future Chips Intel unveils

Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Perry E. Metzger
On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:58:51 +1200 Peter Gutmann pgut...@cs.auckland.ac.nz wrote: Ben Laurie b...@google.com writes: On 2 July 2010 13:19, Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=25670channel=Briefingssection=Microprocessors

Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Matt Crawford
On Jul 12, 2010, at 11:22 AM, Perry E. Metzger wrote: The literature makes it clear at this point that short of carefully tearing apart and analyzing the entire chip, you're not going to catch subtle behavioral changes designed to allow attackers backdoor access. I happen to be re-reading

Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Jack Lloyd
On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 12:22:51PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: BTW, let me note that if Intel wanted to gimmick their chips to make them untrustworthy, there is very little you could do about it. The literature makes it clear at this point that short of carefully tearing apart and

Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Eric Murray
On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 12:22:51PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: Plugging in an external unit is not going to happen in practice. If it isn't nearly free and built in, it won't be used. I completely agree. But HW RNGs are a pain in a lot of ways- modern chip design libraries don't include

Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Nicolas Williams
On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 01:13:10PM -0400, Jack Lloyd wrote: I think it's important to make the distinction between trusting Intel not to have made it actively malicious, and trusting them to have gotten it perfectly correct in such a way that it cannot fail. Fortunately, the second problem,

Fwd: Anyone make any sense out of this skype hack announcement?

2010-07-12 Thread Christian Collberg
The skype client was reverse engineered several years ago: @inproceedings{biondi06silver,   title = {Silver Needle in the Skype},   author = {Philippe Biondi and Fabrice Desclaux},   note = \url{www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf},   booktitle =

Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Paul Wouters
On Mon, 12 Jul 2010, Ben Laurie wrote: On 2 July 2010 13:19, Eugen Leitl eu...@leitl.org wrote: http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=25670channel=Briefingssection=Microprocessors Tuesday, June 29, 2010 Nanoscale Random Number Circuit to Secure Future Chips Intel

Re: Anyone make any sense out of this skype hack announcement?

2010-07-12 Thread Steve Furlong
I don't know if the new crack reveals anything new. We have a writeup about the Skype protection techniques in Surreptitious Software, our book on security-through-obscurity. (Sorry for the blatant self-promotion). I appreciate the self-promotion. My only request is that you include ISBN,

Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Paul Wouters
On Mon, 12 Jul 2010, Eric Murray wrote: Then there's FIPS- current 140 doesn't have a provision for HW RNG. They certify software RNG only, presumeably because proving a HW RNG to be random enough is very difficult. So what's probably the primary market (companies who want to meet FIPS) isn't

Re: Intel to also add RNG

2010-07-12 Thread Eric Murray
On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 03:37:45PM -0400, Paul Wouters wrote: On Mon, 12 Jul 2010, Eric Murray wrote: Then there's FIPS- current 140 doesn't have a provision for HW RNG. They certify software RNG only, presumeably because proving a HW RNG to be random enough is very difficult. So what's

Re: 1280-Bit RSA

2010-07-12 Thread James A. Donald
On 2010-07-11 10:11 AM, Brandon Enright wrote: On Fri, 9 Jul 2010 21:16:30 -0400 (EDT) Jonathan Thornburgjth...@astro.indiana.edu wrote: The following usenet posting from 1993 provides an interesting bit (no pun itended) of history on RSA key sizes. The key passage is the last paragraph,