Re: [saag] NSA bug in Windows 10

[Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]>]

Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]> writes:

>Has anyone checked the Certificate Transparency logs to see if any bogus
>certs matching the NSA pattern are recorded? I would expect not as we require
>specific NIST curves that have specific names.

Speculation: The universal standard for ECDSA is the NIST curves, with some
minor subset using the Brainpool curves, but in any case named curves.
However, the NSA being the NSA, I'll bet they use their own curves and not the
NIST ones [0], which were created in secret by some dodgy US TLA and then fed
to NIST.  So the reason for the NSA choosing to disclose the vulnerability may
be that it principally affects them and no-one else, which also means there's
not much chance of anything appearing in the CT logs.

Oh, and rumors that, since it's the NSA that's recommending the fix to a
Microsoft product, they've told them to double the security of their ROT13
implementation by applying it twice, are entirely false.

Peter.

[0] Suite B, which did use NIST curves, seems to have fallen by the wayside.