Re: How regularly is the GnuPG source code examined?

From: Unruh (unruh-spam_at_physics.ubc.ca)
Date: 09/28/05

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    Date: 28 Sep 2005 15:39:16 GMT

    Francois Grieu <fgrieu@francenet.fr> writes:

    >In article <dhchrf$15cn$1@agate.berkeley.edu>,
    > daw@taverner.cs.berkeley.edu (David Wagner) wrote:

    >> I already gave one example of an apparently accidental bug in PGP that
    >> (a) allowed to attacker, intercepting only the output of the program,
    >> to gain enough information to decrypt it easily; (b) could have been
    >> inserted by an insider; (c) was in fact not detected for a long time.

    >Is this anecdote, of great interest, documented in detail somewhere ?
    >Like which PGP, which version, on which platform ? Conditions for an
    >attack to be mountable ? Computational cost thereof ?

    It was during the launch of new "new" pgp for which the dispute with RSA
    had finally been resolved when the patent holder MIT came to an agreement
    with its sole licensor, RSADSI, to issue a non-commercial version. One of
    the MIT people who helped rewrite pgp (2.5.x?)for that release suddenly discovered that he
    had screwed up the random number generator so that it found new randomness
    and then never used it-- ie just overwrote it with some fixed value.
    This had been in the new release for a few weeks (not months). Had this
    been malicious then the attacker would have had a much reduced key space to
    search through.

    This is all from memory, so not sure if you would call it documentation.
    It is all in the archives of alt.security.pgp, which was where he announced
    the bug.

    >Thanks in advance,

    > François Grieu

  • Next message: Unruh: "Re: The effects of quantum computers"

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