ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
70% Positive
Analyzed from 1363 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#bit#rsa#key#tls#keys#https#post#brute#ssl#force
Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Update: found this explanation in a comment at the top of the (surprisingly short) Go file in the linked repo:
The target client is Netscape Communicator 4.51 (both the 40-bit export build and the 128-bit US build) with its clock set to the year 2000.
Go's crypto/tls cannot help: it dropped SSLv3 in Go 1.14, never accepted the SSLv2-compatible ClientHello that Netscape 4 sends, and never had RC4-MD5 or the 40-bit export suites. So this file carries its own tiny SSLv3 server-side implementation on top of stdlib primitives (RSA PKCS#1 v1.5, RC4, DES, 3DES, MD5, SHA-1). The server key is 512-bit RSA so that export clients can encrypt the premaster secret to it directly, without a ServerKeyExchange.
I've written and worked on a few TLS implementations, so it wasn't terribly interesting to me. And I have to go to work tomorrow and solve real, modern CA problems :)
But in short, I wanted to use Go, and it doesn't support SSLv3, the SSLv2 Client Hello, or the 40-bit RC4-MD5 export-grade cipher suites which I wanted to support too.
I was more shocked that I managed to get stock OpenSSL to issue a certificate that worked. There's a number of things that didn't work there, too. You can find my scars in mkcert.sh in the repo. Perhaps all of this is worthy of a follow-up post.
I could have tried to get some old server running instead, but I wouldn't have wanted to deploy that on the internet, even on an isolated Fly VM.
They used a similar kind of custom (and flawed) TLS implementation in their game(s) which allowed signing new certificates after brute forcing.
The benefit to this is that users can now play these games without needing to burn a new CD with either the SSL certs swapped, or the code patched to dummy out the checks. A "retail CD" will simply work with private servers now.
I've also been on the other side of the fence, building a "retro internet" service [1] has meant trying to implement ancient SSL/TLS services for things and people that want to use them on the network.
Getting modern OpenSSL (aka what ships in Debian) to even accept these ciphers, let alone keys that short is an uphill battle. Understandably, they're disabled by default and (in Debian at least) the cipher support isn't even compiled into the binary! This requires building a custom OpenSSL to build Nginx against to serve ancient SSL.
Presumably for the OP this kind of work was either outside of their realm of knowledge, or simply "easier" to outsource to the slop machine. Though I hope the machine they're running their demo TLS implementation on is separated completely from their own network. Rolling your own crypto libraries is always a bad idea [2] and I doubt LLM's have "improved" that
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSJsGNIDjtc
[2] https://soatok.blog/2025/01/31/hell-is-overconfident-develop...
When you outsource to the slop machine, you don't have anything interesting to say (usually).
I will say that my projects have a "leading the pack" anti-AI policy [1]
[1] https://wiki.cursedsilicon.net/wiki/AI_Policy
Looks like 70% of cloudflare requests are using post-quantum TLS! https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum
The CADO-NFS page gives some benchmark results for 16 threads, suggesting the algorithm parallelises at least somewhat well.
It's essential that you do, because generating pretty plausible outputs is an LLM's bread and butter. Otherwise, only the one that you actually tested should be expected to be correct.
The biggest thing I'm afraid of is that the generated scripts missed some entries, or otherwise mis-classified them, in particular whether it got the trust bits right for each root. I would put the chances of that having some errors relatively high.
But there's too many roots across too many browser installers, so I'm not going to confirm the Netscape UI matches what the extracted data says.
The planet has a lot of people.
Remember, Shor is like a coded gate level algorithm expressed as sequences of interconnected stable QuBits. So, if you double the cost for each RSA bit you add, its not "nothing" in terms of how you wire the rig.
(not a cryptographer, or a QC person so I expect to be hit by a very cold but stable quantum clue-by-four shortly. Maybe they have to hit me 1 million times, to confirm I'm hit. Its statistics.)
Steve Weis, who has been doing RSA factoring on some large GPU clusters, estimates factoring 1024-bit RSA would take about 2000 GPU-years, which is well within the range of anyone with a serious budget.
Naively looking at scaling factors is going to be tricky, because computation of this scale is going to involve things like "how do I hijack every GPU on the planet", or worrying about when the sun will run out of hydrogen if you're using a single CPU.
says approximately the same as a 112-bit symmetric key, so 1/65536 as fast as however your target platform does at AES128, but probably 2000 times slower again because RSA is a really slow algorithm.
128-bit security is the de-facto minimum standard. Anything less than that is suspect. That's a 3072-bit RSA key. We only ever tolerated shorter keys because RSA is so slow. You should switch to ed25519 if you can.