Month: November 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being established.

Underscoring the importance of their discovery, the researchers used their findings to calculate the private portion of almost 200 unique SSH keys they observed in public Internet scans taken over the past seven years. The researchers suspect keys used in IPsec connections could suffer the same fate. SSH is the cryptographic protocol used in secure shell connections that allows computers to remotely access servers, usually in security-sensitive enterprise environments. IPsec is a protocol used by virtual private networks that route traffic through an encrypted tunnel.

The vulnerability occurs when there are errors during the signature generation that takes place when a client and server are establishing a connection. It affects only keys using the RSA cryptographic algorithm, which the researchers found in roughly a third of the SSH signatures they examined. That translates to roughly 1 billion signatures out of the 3.2 billion signatures examined. Of the roughly 1 billion RSA signatures, about one in a million exposed the private key of the host.

Enlarge / This panchromatic view of galaxy cluster MACS0416 was created by combining infrared observations from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope with visible-light data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light; a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It is November 13, and today we're traveling 4.3 billion light-years away from Earth, to a cluster of galaxies known as MACS0416. This distant object, which turns out to be two galaxy clusters that are colliding with one another, was first discovered in images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Hubble, of course, brought "deep field" astronomy alive by publishing images with thousands of galaxies. Now, by combining Hubble observations with the new James Webb Space Telescope, NASA and its partners have produced an even deeper field image. The resulting panchromatic image, which combines visible and infrared light, gives us one of the most comprehensive views of the Universe ever obtained.