Re: Lotus Notes

[JMKELSEY@delphi.com]

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[To: Cypherpunks, Lucky Green ## Date: 01/24/96 12:33 pm ##
 Subject: Re: Lotus Notes]

>Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 23:24:39 -0800
>From: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)
>Subject: Re: Lotus Notes

>You are assuming that they *want* the hole to be unpatchable. I see
>no reason why they should. "We tried out best, but these darn
>hackers found a way to enable full 64 bits. Sorry, but we tried."
>Perhaps the most intelligent thing to do was to keep the GAK subject
>to a simple patch.

I'm sorry, I don't think I was very clear in this post.  I wasn't
concerned with whether Lotus left the escrow feature easy to
disable, I wanted to know whether they'd intelligently padded their
RSA-encrypted 24-bit key leak.  If they thought this through, they
did, but if not, then they have essentially left their exportable
security level at 40 bits, because of the dictionary attack David
and some other people pointed out.  This ought to be relatively easy
to check from disassembled code, but it can also be checked by
simply generating a few thousand messages (maybe six or seven
thousand, to be safe), and seeing whether or not we ever get a
duplicate LEAF. We expect to, after about 2^12 encryptions, if
they're using fixed padding.  Of course, RSA key exchange blobs for
short keys must always be padded out like this, or be vulnerable to
dictionary attacks.

P.S. Does anyone know whether or not the RSA key used to partially
escrow the session key is a reasonable length (i.e., 1024 bits)?  If
it's another 512-bit RSA key, then it was born with a bullseye on
its chest.

>-- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com>
>   PGP encrypted mail preferred.

Note:  Please respond via e-mail as well as or instead of posting,
as I get CP-LITE instead of the whole list.

   --John Kelsey, jmkelsey@delphi.com / kelsey@counterpane.com
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