Hi SM,
On 04/11/2017 01:25 AM, S Moonesamy wrote:
>
> I sometimes read the local tech-related news articles. I asked the
> journalist whether it was about RC4 as the news article did not contain
> the technical details which I was interested in. The patch is described
> as a bandaid as RC4 is no longer recommended and because OpenBSD has
> already switched from RC4 to ChaCha20. I was interested in where the
> patch came from; it was from FreeBSD.
>
On 15 February 2014, during a meetup by the Linux User Group, you did a
presentation on the .mu ccTLD. During that same meetup a former member
of the Linux User Group talked about Ed25519 and ChaCha20. You explained
the attendees a bit on the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF) and I believe several people in the room understood a little the
nature of your work (e.g RFC 7479 [1]).
>
> My tweet was a simple question. As I received a reply I provided a link
> in case anyone was interested in RC4. There is an academic paper [1]
> from 2001 about the RC4 security issue. I wondered about whether it was
> worthwhile to provide a temporary patch instead of porting code which is
> already available from OpenBSD. There was also a short discussion on a
> FreeBSD mailing list in March about the issue. I didn't mention all
> that as nobody was interested in a technical discussion [2] the topic.
>
Knowing the way you throw jokes some times, I guessed there was
something particular about RC4 that you were triggering. The bandaid
mention by the FreeBSD contributor was a good hint. The academic paper
is mentioned in the code comments. To be honest, I didn't read the paper
thoroughly.
I however had a look at I. Mironov's paper in which he does mention the
earlier work of S. Fluhrer. I was interested to know why the FreeBSD
patch discarded the first 3072 bytes. I had a better idea on the 3072
value from the conclusion part of the paper. Thank you for the hints.
[1]
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7479
--
Ish Sookun
I drink coffee and manage Linux servers for lexpress.mu.
Received on Tue Apr 11 2017 - 06:12:00 PST