- Lotus notes mac client buggy bugs Patch#
- Lotus notes mac client buggy bugs android#
- Lotus notes mac client buggy bugs software#
While officials carefully avoid the term “back door” - or any suggestion of weakening our encryption systems against real attackers - this is wishful thinking. While the proposals aren’t explicit, they would presumably involve deliberately weakening encryption tech so that governments can intercept and read our conversations. and European politicians have been publicly mooting the notion of a new set of cryptographic backdoors in systems we use today. However, for the past several months, U.S. This might be an academic point if it was only a history lesson. So badly, that while the policies were ultimately scrapped, they’re still hurting us today. The export-grade RSA ciphers are the remains of a 1980s-vintage effort to weaken cryptography so that intelligence agencies would be able to monitor foreign traffic. There’s a much more important moral to this story. Still, to take this as the main lesson of the work would, I think, be missing the forest for the trees. With good luck, servers supporting export-grade RSA cipher suites will soon be rare curiosity.
Lotus notes mac client buggy bugs android#
The client bugs will soon be patched (update your devices! unless you have Android in which case you’re screwed). In a strictly technical sense you’re probably right. You might think this is all a bit absurd and doesn’t affect you very much. Over the next two weeks we will hopefully see export ciphersuites extinguished from the Internet.
Lotus notes mac client buggy bugs Patch#
This was announced (though not very loudly) in January of this year.Īkamai and other CDNs are also rolling out a patch to solve these problems. The most recent of OpenSSL does have a patch. These people may be right, but they also lack poetry in their souls. Some will point out that an MITM attack on the NSA is not really an ‘MITM attack on the NSA’ because NSA outsources its web presence to the Akamai CDN (see obligatory XKCD at right). This is doable, but it’s generally considered too onerous if you have to do it for every single connection.Īttack images courtesy Karthik, Antoine INRIA. Even if you do accidentally negotiate an export-grade RSA ciphersuite, a meaningful attack still requires the attacker to factor a 512-bit RSA key (or break a 40-bit symmetric cipher).Almost no servers, it was believed, even offer export-grade ciphersuites anymore.In theory this means that even if the server supports export-grade crypto, your session will use strong crypto. Most ‘modern’ clients (e.g., web browsers) won’t offer export grade ciphersuites as part of the negotiation process.There are three general reasons we don’t think they matter anymore: We don’t usually worry about export-grade cipher suites very much, because supposedly they aren’t very relevant to the modern Internet. If EXPORT ciphers are known to be broken, what’s the news here? Today they live on like zombies - just waiting to eat our flesh. Unfortunately, the EXPORT ciphersuites didn’t go away. The U.S eventually lifted the most onerous of its export policies. This story has a happy ending, after a fashion. In theory this would allow ‘strong’ clients to negotiate ‘strong’ ciphersuites with servers that supported them, while still providing compatibility to the broken foreign clients. servers needed to support both strong and weak crypto, the SSL designers used a ‘cipher suite’ negotiation mechanism to identify the best cipher both parties could support. The need to support export-grade ciphers led to some technical challenges. Or if you prefer modern terms, think of it as the original “ golden master key“. In theory it was designed to ensure that the NSA would have the ability to ‘access’ communications, while allegedly providing crypto that was still ‘good enough’ for commercial use. The 512-bit export grade encryption was a compromise between dumb and dumber. For RSA encryption, this implied a maximum allowed key length of 512 bits.* In order to distribute crypto outside of the U.S., companies were required to deliberately ‘weaken’ the strength of encryption keys. That is: the SSL protocol itself was deliberately designed to be broken.īack in the early 1990s when SSL was first invented at Netscape Corporation, the United States maintained a rigorous regime of export controls for encryption systems. With all that in mind, there’s a third aspect of SSL/TLS that doesn’t get nearly as much attention.
Lotus notes mac client buggy bugs software#
But more to the point: it’s because even when the crypto is right, many software implementations still get things wrong. In part this is because they were developed during an era when modern cryptographic best practices weren’t nailed down yet. In practice, SSL and TLS have been a more like a work in progress.