[conspire] Cert debacle involving a billion certs

[Michael Paoli]

> From: "Rick Moen" <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [conspire] Cert debacle involving a billion certs
> Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2019 14:24:41 -0700

> Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):
>
>>  How many bits make something "secure"?   64 bits was deemed to be
>>  "enough" in 2016, but that was 3 years ago.  When does the 64 bit
>>  requirement need to  be increased?
>>
>> It's hard to get excited about 63 vs 64 bits except as an
>> embarrassment to big companies that should have done better.
>
> Vastly expanding the number of bits used for an encryption scheme, above
> and beyond current best practices, and thinking one has automatically
> improved things, is usually a bonehead error:  The person making that
> error soon realises his/her mistake upon discovering that everything
> using the cipher now has unacceptably slow performance and very
> excessive computational overhead.  _Or_, equally bad, other people's
> associated software breaks on handling the data.

Or ... they've "improved" the security there vastly (and wastefully)
beyond weaker point.  E.g. DNSSEC - no use having any key larger than
the root (.) key.  Rather like super strong/secure lock on a door -
why bother when it's so much easier to defeat the
door/hinges/frame/wall/use the key under the doormat/...

And ... one bit - a (binary) order of magnitude.  Does it matter,
or not, and how much?  "It depends".  In this case, a cert - one
cert - or a few or whatever - not a big deal.  Sure, not up to spec,
so not properly correct and secure as it ought be, but a handful,
not much real consequence.  But ... thousands, ... millions such certs,
uhm ... small error, but ... at large/massive scale 8-O ... not so good.
And, what's an off-by-order-of-binary-magnitude matter?  Well, ...
sometimes not much.  Other times ... hmmm... should kids start
driving at about 8 years of age, and getting married and drinking
at 9 and 10.5 years?  Uhm ... so, sometimes it quite does matter.