From: Thomas Ptacek (tqbfmatasano.com)
Date: Tue Dec 30 2008 - 13:33:42 CST

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If you take everything in the paper at face value, a couple things
mitigate this attack:

* The research team had access not only to a cluster of PS3s but to a
specially optimized MD5 collision-finding implementation, which they
had because Lenstra's team has been playing with a PS3 cluster for
awhile.

* The research team had access to a currently-unpublished optimization
to (presumably the birthday-bits search part of) the collision-finding
algorithm,

* The attack could be made impractical by randomizing the serial
numbers for all future certs issued by RapidSSL (and, presumably, by
banning MD5).

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 11:43 AM, Dave Aitel <daveimmunityinc.com> wrote:
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> So if someone was able to get a root CA for $20000 - shouldn't we
> remove the RapidSSL root CA from our browsers with the next browser
> update? I don't see why people think this would be hard to replicate
> and hasn't been done previously to RapidSSL. Is it because no one
> other than that one team can do math or buy PS3s?
>
> Microsoft's advisory on this is essentially defaulting to the "No one
> else has ever done this" position. This is weird. Trusted Roots that
> could have been used to sign these things need to get re-issued,
> right? What am I missing here?
>
> "You fail and are no longer trusted" seems like a viable option here
> that people are avoiding for some reason.
>
> - -dave
>
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Thomas H. Ptacek // matasano security
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