Re: Creating a rogue CA certificate

[chort <chort0 () gmail com>]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 4:02 PM,  <Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu> wrote:

> And if you don't have a room full of PS3s, the FAQ at the bottom helpfully
> tells you that the attack needed the equivalent of 32 CPU-years inside a 3-day
> window, which tells you a 4,000 node botnet could probably work (again, outside
> the feature list for metasploit).  Presumably, a larger botnet would allow
> a BFI attack that lacked the "crucial improvements".

The viability of that approach depends on how much the code depends on
the systems being clustered together over low-latency interconnects.
4000 machines spread all across the internet separated by 300ms of
latency is not the same thing as 4000 machines in the same room
running a cluster OS.

Yes, given enough machines you could do the computations even with
each system acting fairly autonomously, but it could require a
drastically different approach.  As a disclaimer, I do not know the
details of how the PlayStation Lab was utilized for this particular
task, so they may well have been used as discrete units.


-- 
chort

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