WPA2 and Infineon
The recent bug in WPA2 has a worst case outcome that is the same as using a wifi without a password: People can sniff, maybe inject… it’s not great but you connect to open wifi at Starbucks anyway, and you’re fine with that because you visit sites with HTTPS and SSH. Eventually your client will get a fix too, so the whole thing is pretty “meh”.
But there’s a reason I call it “WPA2 bug” and I call the recent issue with Infineon key generation “the Infineon disaster”. It’s much bigger. It seems like the whole of Estonia needs to re-issue ID cards, and several years worth of PC-, smartcard-, Yubikey, and other production have been generating bad keys. And these keys will stick around.
From now until forever when you generate, use, or accept RSA keys you have to check for these weak keys. I assume OpenSSH will if it hasn’t already.
But then what? It’s not like servers can just reject these keys, or it’ll lock people out. And it’s not clear that an adversary even has your public key for SSH. And you can’t crack the key if you don’t have the public half. Maybe a warning, and then in a year start rejecting the keys?
And then you have to trust that every other implementation does the same.
But then you have all the clients and servers that just never get updated or audited…
So this is a disaster. It’s worse than the Debian randomness bug.