Re: Security team successfully cracks SSL using 200 PS3's and MD5 flaw.

[Joe Abley <jabley () hopcount ca>]

On 2009-01-02, at 09:04, Rodrick Brown wrote:

> A team of security researchers and academics has broken a core piece
> of Internet technology. They made their work public at the 25th Chaos
> Communication Congress in Berlin today. The team was able to create a
> rogue certificate authority and use it to issue valid SSL certificates
> for any site they want. The user would have no indication that their
> HTTPS connection was being monitored/modified.

I read a comment somewhere else that while this is interesting, and  
good work, and well done, in practice it's much easier to social- 
engineer a certificate with a stolen credit card from a real CA than  
it is to create a fake CA.

(I'd give proper attribution if I could remember who it was, but it  
put things into perspective for me at the time so I thought I'd share.)


Joe