FBI accused of planting backdoor in OpenBSD IPSEC stack
 

I have no idea what this actually means, but it seemed important to a geek buddy of mine so I thought I'd share.

What does this mean to Joe everyguy and what does this mean to Joe Perez?

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/n...psec-stack.ars

basically they canon rushed.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...5&d=1292465971

Well... basically, openbsd code has been copied into almost everything out there, since its not under the GNU license. Theoretically this back doors could be in your cell phone or blue ray player. Nothing to see here, move along. (in reality, I doubt that anything remains after 10 years, especially given the audits that occur within openbsd)

IPSec is more or less the protocol that encrypts your packets so that they are secure. Here is an article that says it does not have a backdoor.

Basically if it is true what I understand it does if is gets certain parts of the encryption key so that they can brute force the encryption key quicker.

If this really happened 10 years ago I'm wondering if it would still be relevant. Key sizes and algorithms have changed fairly dramatically since then which even makes brute force pretty damn difficult. Just to give you some perspective - the DES standard (used until 2k2) had a 56 bit key, today we use the AES standard in which the smallest key size is 2.5x larger. Even if they escrow bits of of the encryption key they'd still have quite a bit to crack.

It sort of means Linux and random ----.

DES? If I had a dime for every WEP neighbor. . . Mr. Ubuntu, my directional antenna, and my friend Mr. Kismet disagrees. Good times.

We're only being told now since it's no longer relevant. What we should pay attention to is what HAS happened if this is true over the past 10yrs...and what that may hint at what could be going on now.

I guess I fail to see your cross reference between WEP and DES. Last time I checked the last attack on DES took 22 hours and something like 100k computers. Comparing WEP cracking to that is like comparing removal of the "butterflies" in the Operation game to actual brain surgery.

Who tries to break encryption anymore? MITM attacks are ftw.