[ILUG] serious openssl/openssh hole found

[Justin Mason]

Josh Glover writes:
> 2008/5/14 Nick Murtagh <nickm at go2.ie>:
> 
> > FRLinux wrote:
> >> The private key is still considered as untrustworthy as stated by the
> >> advisory. That is the way i understand it.
> >
> > From what point of view? Could someone take the public cert and
> > derive the private key from it?
> 
> IANAM (Mathematician), but I believe that it is impossible to derive a
> private key from a public one. There is just not enough information in
> the public key. References:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Signature_Algorithm#Key_generation
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA#Key_generation
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie-Hellman#Description

if there are only 256k private keys, and each priv key has a corresponding
public key, then you can precompute all those priv/pub key pairs and map
the public key to the private key.  That's what is possible right now.

for what it's worth, on my desktop I can generate a keypair in 0.2s, so I
could precompute those keypairs in 14.5 hours.  and this task is
trivially parallelizable.

--j.