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0 pointstptacek2y ago0 comments

Ultimately, I think the big problem here is encryption. A footgun ECC constructions don't have is direct public key encryption; idiomatically, ECC "encryption" is a DH key establishment and then a block/bulk cipher doing the encryption, where RSA exposes a direct encryption transform that people idiomatically use.

It's just also the case that RSA in popular use is virtually never OAEP or PSS, and that this isn't a problem you have with ECC constructions, even if you're not using the most misuse-resistant of them.

It's also kind of a dead letter at this point. The ship has sailed: new designs all use curves, and have for something like a decade now.

(I didn't write a paper on this, but I do believe myself to be the proprietor of the Internet's single largest collection of Bleichenbacher padding oracle exploits, in every conceivable language, so there's my bona fides.)

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SAI_Peregrinus2y ago

I'd say encryption and PKCS#1v1.5. The latter is just hard enough to implement safely that it's quite likely to be vulnerable, but not so obviously bad as to be considered definitively broken & set for removal. PKCS#1v1.5 support might not be a deliberate backdoor, but allowing it in a new protocol today would be suspicious.

We went to curves largely due to the flaws of PKCS#1v1.5, not so much due to RSA itself being bad (though the false sense of simplicity it has is certainly dangerous). RSASSA-PSS verification is fast, so while the keys & signatures are big there's still some reason to use it for constrained devices.

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SAI_Peregrinus2y ago

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