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Comment by john_strinlai | Hacker News Reader

new email from wayne, who is the original reporter:

"I've had more than a few emails asking on how this was discovered. The simple answer is: https://github.com/google/paranoid_crypto

Yeah, out of the box. CCADB was intended to be a quick corpus test before looking at subscriber certificates...

I've done a far more thorough check of all existing CCADB certificates, thankfully no more hits. Most of my time has been spent going over the basics that everyone assumed someone else had already done - a critical mistake to ever make near security.

So unless someone has significantly more computational resources or access to more cryptanalysis research the low-hanging fruit has been caught so far."

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-polic...

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I must say, if I was writing a password cracker, I probably would not think to actually start at "1".

Security through incredulity

"Certainly no one is that lazy/stupid/ironic..."

Of course not, we start at negative zero.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signed_zero

When I walk into a bar, I always ask the bartender for negative zero beers, just to check the place out, before placing my actual order.

I have not yet been accused of arson, but it's only a matter of time.

Learning about the concept of “negative zero” in school stuck with me. It was one of those lessons where the professor had us bang our heads against one’s complement to understand the shortcomings and introduced two’s complement like Moses coming down with the stone tablets.

Welp, there goes that password

I don't know, when I run a password cracker, I always start with a brute force pass of very short passwords. Doing so adds a negligible amount of time to the crack, and its surprising how many short passwords you'll find in systems that permit them.

I was a little surprised when a well-known password cracker managed to pop a bunch of passwords set by a sysadmin at a place I used to work at, who had left under something of a cloud.

I wouldn't have got them if I hadn't set it to start at three characters, on a hunch.

Cameron, if you're out there, I hope you're making less of an arse of it and not still using "CAM" as a password for everything.

You should start at "" or 0, not "1".

First time I pointed John the Ripper to a password file it immediately started beeping like crazy. Turns out default password was no password, and 70% of the accounts were unused. Those happy quaint 90s...

And space / newline / carriage return / null byre should be in your charsets, even if the people who use those belong in prison.

As I understood it, any private key up to N can be cracked in √Ν steps. I don't know what threshold they used, but they probably ran the scan for small private keys.

I don't think that's true. Got a source?

It's called the baby-step giant-step algorithm, and it's referred in the report thread to Mozilla:

"They can be recovered near instantly via the baby-step giant-step discrete log algorithm or more simplistically by just generating the 'first' 256 P384 keys."

Oh, I thought you meant "private key up to N bits", not "private key up to the exact value N". In that case, sure, but for non-eMudhra-issued keys BSGS's more relevant complexity figure is O(2^keybits). Unless you've a quantum computer on you, in which case I'm told it's easy-peasy :)

> https://github.com/google/paranoid_crypto

This repository was archived by the owner on Aug 19, 2026. It is now read-only.

I guess now that we've checked, nobody will ever make a mistake like this again so we don't need this anymore? :)

You can still use a read-only archive.

Archived means it’s still available but signals that it won’t be developed.

Last commit was 2 years ago anyway.

Archive is a nice solution in between just letting it rot on the vine forever and deleting it. Leaving it open doesn't immediately signal to users that the codebase is no longer in development, youd have to check when the last commit was. And even then, that doesn't tell you much. Is this so simple of an app that there's really nothing to patch or upgrade for long periods? A python script that converts some legacy file format into an open one might effectively be complete, there's nothing left to add or fix and there's no real threat vector to exploit. Or is this a cutting edge app that someone committed daily for years but now hasn't moved in a year.

The one thing I don't like about archive is the inability to add new issues. If I encounter a new issue, I don't necessarily want to fork it and track the new issue myself. I don't want to take responsibility for the code, I just want to let people know so someone else can fix it if they care.

I am sure the NSA will keep checking on our behalf.

I'm guessing this is the code:

https://github.com/google/paranoid_crypto/blob/main/paranoid...

I have to be honest, that hasn't stopped me from trying!

the audacity of guessing all low hanging fruits have been found, right after guessing privkey=4

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