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shadowgovt • today at 3:17 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Correct. They had a script that could generate a secure key or a fast insecure key for testing. The script generated both at the same time.

Human error was selecting the wrong output file and promoting it forward.

It's not at all the kind of thing you want to see in a reliable, secure, mature process... There shouldn't be a step where a human even makes a choice there.

And it's exactly the kind of thing most companies are doing, most of the time, more often than we would like.

An awful lot of the world runs on spit and bailing wire and things too easy to automate yet, and the parts that don't cost more.


Replies

cyberpunk • today at 3:56 PM

Ever dealt with key generation on a HSM?

Thousand line shell scripts that use expect to drive 30+ answers to a multi-choice interactive tui (that only works on one version of redhat from 2008 or something) is not so unusual, can totally understand how it happened. No excuses in that though.

AlotOfReading • today at 4:00 PM

Why would you need a fast insecure key at all though? Just use a real key. Key generation for an ECC curve should be lightning fast.