<story><title>How to Protect Yourself from NSA Attacks on 1024-bit DH</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/how-to-protect-yourself-from-nsa-attacks-1024-bit-DH</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PlzSnow</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;FWIU of the situation, we have reason to suspect the government has &amp;#x27;cracked&amp;#x27; the default large primes that are commonly used by a bunch of different software packages, including web servers.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is just nonsense. Am I the only sane one here? Can no-one else see that the response is hysterical? There&amp;#x27;s no evidence whatsover that any of this has happened. It&amp;#x27;s conspiracy conjecture.&lt;p&gt;Look, I know the cultural narrative on HN is that the NSA is the all-seeing-eye, but can&amp;#x27;t we have a sensible discussion about this? Because it&amp;#x27;s embarrassing for me to be active on a website that reverts to the mean conspiracy theory of the world.</text></item><item><author>kordless</author><text>FWIU of the situation, we have reason to suspect the government has &amp;#x27;cracked&amp;#x27; the default large primes that are commonly used by a bunch of different software packages, including web servers. Assuming they have, the challenge is then defined as determining which applications and sites tend to use these standardized or hard-coded primes.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Breaking a second 1024-bit prime would allow passive eavesdropping on connections to nearly 20% of the top million HTTPS websites.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll point out that agwa&amp;#x27;s comment is relevant here in mitigation. Without any control over what primes are used on the server side, the only resolution would be to detect the server is using such a prime and then avoid communicating with that server until they&amp;#x27;ve patched their systems. Perhaps someone who knows more about this could comment on how we could go about notifying websites they are using venerable primes?&lt;p&gt;Maybe a Chrome plugin attached to an IPFS client could be one method to warn on access of sites using default primes.</text></item><item><author>diafygi</author><text>Does anyone have links to bugs for the affected programs to make 2048 the minimum by default? It seems like we shouldn&amp;#x27;t have to continue to manually configure secure settings.&lt;p&gt;OpenVPN?
SSH?
Nginx?
Apache?&lt;p&gt;Where are the bugs to make these not use insecure dhparams by default?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;nonsense ... the only sane one here ... hysterical ... conspiracy conjecture ... the cultural narrative ... all-seeing eye ... sensible ... conspiracy&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nearly this entire comment is name-calling in the sense of the HN guidelines when they say: &lt;i&gt;When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. &amp;quot;That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3&amp;quot; can be shortened to &amp;quot;1 + 1 is 2, not 3.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;When posting to HN, please edit that out and stick to the substance.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;newsguidelines.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;newsguidelines.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Protect Yourself from NSA Attacks on 1024-bit DH</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/how-to-protect-yourself-from-nsa-attacks-1024-bit-DH</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>PlzSnow</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;FWIU of the situation, we have reason to suspect the government has &amp;#x27;cracked&amp;#x27; the default large primes that are commonly used by a bunch of different software packages, including web servers.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is just nonsense. Am I the only sane one here? Can no-one else see that the response is hysterical? There&amp;#x27;s no evidence whatsover that any of this has happened. It&amp;#x27;s conspiracy conjecture.&lt;p&gt;Look, I know the cultural narrative on HN is that the NSA is the all-seeing-eye, but can&amp;#x27;t we have a sensible discussion about this? Because it&amp;#x27;s embarrassing for me to be active on a website that reverts to the mean conspiracy theory of the world.</text></item><item><author>kordless</author><text>FWIU of the situation, we have reason to suspect the government has &amp;#x27;cracked&amp;#x27; the default large primes that are commonly used by a bunch of different software packages, including web servers. Assuming they have, the challenge is then defined as determining which applications and sites tend to use these standardized or hard-coded primes.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Breaking a second 1024-bit prime would allow passive eavesdropping on connections to nearly 20% of the top million HTTPS websites.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll point out that agwa&amp;#x27;s comment is relevant here in mitigation. Without any control over what primes are used on the server side, the only resolution would be to detect the server is using such a prime and then avoid communicating with that server until they&amp;#x27;ve patched their systems. Perhaps someone who knows more about this could comment on how we could go about notifying websites they are using venerable primes?&lt;p&gt;Maybe a Chrome plugin attached to an IPFS client could be one method to warn on access of sites using default primes.</text></item><item><author>diafygi</author><text>Does anyone have links to bugs for the affected programs to make 2048 the minimum by default? It seems like we shouldn&amp;#x27;t have to continue to manually configure secure settings.&lt;p&gt;OpenVPN?
SSH?
Nginx?
Apache?&lt;p&gt;Where are the bugs to make these not use insecure dhparams by default?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>URSpider94</author><text>Ok, how&amp;#x27;s this for sensible? The holy trinity of criminal law is means, motive and opportunity. Let&amp;#x27;s review:&lt;p&gt;Does the NSA have the means for such an attack? The article argues convincingly that they do.&lt;p&gt;Does the NSA have the motive for such an attack? Yes, if their mission is to gain access to as much of the signals traffic in the world as possible -- and I think that&amp;#x27;s been pretty well shown to be true.&lt;p&gt;Does the NSA have the opportunity for such an attack? Certainly, the Snowden papers have shown that the NSA has access to a wide variety of communications channels.&lt;p&gt;So, I think it&amp;#x27;s a perfectly sane argument to say that if the NSA haven&amp;#x27;t performed this attack already, they will certainly do so at some point in time against some target. And, if they are not, state intelligence organizations under other flags, such as China, will -- and China has shown a clear interest in attacking not just military but also commercial targets within the USA.</text></comment>