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Re: some feedback about security from the user's point of view



Am Montag, 24. Januar 2011, um 11:29:25 schrieb AK:
> While the attack sequence presented is valid, in practice, given that
> there are a lot of "Debian based" distributions out there, wouldn't this
> be caught somewhere down the line?

I wouldn't count on it, unfortunately - I have been working on a security/firewall distribution based on Debian (Gibraltar firewall) since ca. 2000, and we just don't have the manpower to audit upstream Debian packages. We certainly didn't catch the openssl bug, and I don't think any of the other Debian-derived distributions did. It would be exceedingly easy to hide a small, known-to-be-colliding binary block in most of the Debian packages and call it with an obscure overflow-like bug in one of the binaries.

Therefore, I strongly suggest to move away from all uses of MD5 and use SHA-2 (>=256) instead (SHA1 already makes the crypto community nervous, and we will need to wait for SHA-3 to arrive at something that will hopefully hold for >10 years...).

best regards,
Rene

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