I cannot believe I’m actually managing to have a semi-regular (posting roughly near the end of the week) feature. Sometimes my ability to focus relentlessly on a goal is terrifying.
This week, I was terrified by someone relentlessly focused on their goal.
If you’ll recall a few episodes ago, I discussed the case of the infamous “We hacked SSL in 3 minutes” folks. Well, I had another few discussions with them.
Um-kay.
So as it turns out, the term “key length” does not require dis-ambiguation into symmetrically or asymmetrically keyed “cryptosystems“. Interestingly enough, the terms “WEP” and “SSL” are also interchangeable.
The Internet is safe again.
Through a series of questions that would make Peter Falk proud, I determined that what had in fact occurred was not that the intrepid engineer had broken 128-bit SSLv3, but rather, had shown them the video of the 128-bit WEP key crack.
Thank goodness.
The very idea of having to tell Bruce Schneier that he was going to have to go on a diet of Power Bars and Mountain Dew while specifying, writing, and implementing a new TLS infrastructure for the internet scared me. Although I’m well aware that he could have us all back up and running by the time we get back from lunch. That’s a fact. He is Bruce Schneier after all.
I am not a fan boy.
I swear.
[tags]ranting, humour, friday, encryption, crypto, Bruce Schneier, fan boy[/tags]