Somehow this is making it even worse. Like, I'm having issues explaining the whole thing to my wife, because I can't come up with a metaphor or parable that's even remotely as ridiculous as what they've done. Anyone's got a good one?

Maybe, like, setting up a factory that builds both LHD and RHD cars and building cars with two passenger seats in the front for two years straight without anyone noticing?

The internet's security relies on an almost impenetrable wall built around it. The king appoints gatekeepers that are each entrusted with a gate they must protect. The gatekeepers must follow a rigorous interrogation process to verify the ID of anyone who wants to pass through their gate. Only then are they permitted to unlock it.

The king was very careful to ensure all the gatekeepers were following the process correctly. It did not occur to anybody that one of the gatekeepers could be using a dirty rag to jam their gate closed instead of a lock.

Once discovered, the wall could be trivially bypassed. The security of the whole internet was immediately broken. Rebuilding the wall to block up the dodgy gate took much effort from very many people.

The internet is a marketplace with a million vendors, each with their own stall.

In order to sell something in the market, you need to prove that you are who you say you are. There are about 200 trusted clerks whose job it is to check your papers and verify your identity. Once they're satisfied, they stamp your papers with an intricate stamp designed by the finest cryptographers.

Anyone seeing that stamp knows that a trusted clerk has checked your identity and approved your papers. Most people don't examine the stamp closely. They simply recognize it as belonging to one of the trusted clerks and accept it.

One of these clerks, however, instead of commissioning an intricate stamp from a master cryptographer, bought an ordinary rubber stamp from an office supply store.

One day, a particularly paranoid cryptographer was examining the stamps used throughout the market and noticed something peculiar about one of them. It wasn't intricate at all. In fact, it was so simple that anybody with a few dollars and a trip to the office supply store could make an identical stamp.

The clerk's job wasn't merely to stamp papers. The clerk was supposed to check that everything written on them was true before applying the stamp.

But now anyone could write whatever they wanted on their own papers and stamp them. The resulting documents would look exactly like ones that had been carefully checked and approved by the clerk.

A robber could write "thebank.com" on their papers, stamp them with the office supply rubber stamp, and present themselves as thebank.com. If they could get a customer to come to their stall instead of the real bank's, the customer would have no reason to suspect anything was wrong.

After all, the papers had the stamp of a trusted clerk. And everyone who trusted that clerk's stamp would believe them.

In the old days a king would "sign" his proclamations by pressing his "unforgeable" signet into a wax seal. This proved the authenticity of the proclamation.

Normally, the king would declare and sign a proc stating that anything signed by his secretary's "unforgeable" signet was to be respected as well. The secretary could delegate authority to others in turn.

Well turns out that one of the signets in the chain of trust was just a picture of a "four" that anybody could have forged, but nobody noticed because in all of the ceremony and stacks of parchment with wax seals, nobody actually checked if the signet was secure.

https://bsky.app/profile/anthonymoser.com/post/3myf5fwpl7s2t is a good explainer I think without getting into the nitty gritty details.

  for the non technical folks:  imagine there was a password that if you guess   it, you can impersonate *any website on the internet*
  
  now imagine the password is literally the number 4

I just explained what it actually is. I said "you know how you go to a website HTTPS and it's secure? Well Apple chose a couple of trusted parties that your phone inherently trusts, and those people approve a few thousand intermediate companies who do the day-to-day certificate work for end websites. One of those intermediates, rather than choosing a 200-digit random number, chose 4, no not four-digits, the number 4". And then we could laugh at some of the memes.

It's hard to explain partly because when you explain this thing we've done with TLS and PKI, it sounds a little insane.

> "We set up a system where every government and a bunch of random banks and IT companies in the world holds the secret codes to everyone's encryption. Then we make them pinky swear not to abuse it, with stern talkings to if they do. And now it's all on fire, because one of them was irresponsible!"

You can know the intractability of the problem that PKI is solving, and the (worse) alternatives that have been tried, but that doesn't make this system not-insane to a normal person, and its at least a little bit the fault of the collective "us".

And it's not like it is an impossible problem; we rely on TOFU for SSH, we have remotely-attestable TPMs everywhere, ZKPPs / PAKEs exist, session keys and federation protocols are widespread. Somewhere in the set of "possible solutions" are options that don't sound unhinged when you explain how we got to this eMuhdra situation.

I told my wife the following: basically when you access a website like your bank, and you see the padlock in the address bar, that means that the computer the website is on has shown your computer a certificate saying that the same company that built the website you’re looking at owns the web address you’re going to.

Your computer has a built-in list of signatures that it trusts and expects to see on the certificates, and one of those signatures was eMudhra’s. These signatures are basically just a proof that you know a secret number without revealing the number itself. If you know the secret number, you can sign the certificate.

There are an unimaginable number of secret numbers. Imagine each atom in the Great Pyramid of Giza is a secret number. And then imagine you have as many Great Pyramids of Giza as there are atoms in the universe. And then double it.

Now imagine you choose any of the numbers represented by all those atoms to sign the certificate with, and you chose 4.

It’s not technically wrong: 4 is indeed a number. But if anyone wants to guess your number, and they start at 0, it won’t take them very long to find your secret number.

Once they’ve found your secret number, they can now sign certificates pretending to be you. So someone could pretend to be your bank, and present a certificate saying “yes, I am your bank” with a signature on it that your computer trusts.

A car manufacturer that reused the same car key for every car.

I told my fiance it was a bit like if a company that produces keypad door locks accidentally added a master code (115) which works on every single door and has for the last two years.

Yours is much funnier!

From Spaceballs:

https://youtu.be/a6iW-8xPw3k?is=IFYVVkYnlKQk1uh7

Everyone in your neighborhood knows your address, but someone discovered two days ago that they can get into your house by sticking a 4" oblong piece of paper into the keyhole. They put it on blast on Facebook, so now everyone in the whole planet is trying to break into your house.

This scene from the classic comedy movie Spaceballs is a good one: https://youtu.be/B-NhD15ocwA?si=pcPfIRTgPVAurW1S

keep it simple. They promised a door key with 10 grooves cut in it, but instead they gave you a door key with 1 groove cut in it.

And when that clicks, extend the metaphor, literally, to a key with ~384 grooves.

y'all underestimate your wives, i simply explained how PKI works in simple terms (alice/bob, public key, private key) and explained that they chose 4 as a private key instead of something complicated, she got it.

I have explained it to a few normies.

I start by saying this is about the tech behind the S in HTTPS. I say that the main point of this is that when you talk to foo.com, it has to prove that the people behind foo.com are on the other end, so it's safe to send them your encrypted password or whatever.

Then I say a bit about how the system works by having a small number of trustworthy companies vouch for other people's servers. This doesn't need too much technical detail to get the point across.

Then I say one of those "trustworthy" companies put an encryption key of 4, where it's supposed to be a long number that's hard to crack. This makes the verification easy to forge.

Then I say that everybody who runs a server needs to remove this company's bad key, and Windows or Mac or your phone needs updates too. And that your web browser probably already quietly removed it, which removes a lot of the risk.

I feel like when I explain it this way people get it.

It's like finding out that all the deadbolt locks made by a company can be opened by an uncut key blank.

You know how we got a lock on our door, and it opens only with our key? Turns out someone made a lock which looked secure, but actually opened when you said the word "friend" - and then engraved "speak, friend, and enter" on the door.

>I can't come up with a metaphor or parable that's even remotely as ridiculous as what they've done

The best example I can think is (some) international borders: yeah, they're heavily regulated entities with lots of written protections (and thousands of miles of impenitrable barricades), but occassionally a hole opens up (whether physically or engineered).

Perhaps a section of border fence is occassionally destroyed (and people sneak in), but this won't happen if the border guards are approving [false] passports from a compromised government actor ("they have a valid passport, according to our inspection"), the border fence doesn't even matter!

Presume anybody can now go to that bad-passport-issuing government and request a passport to then enter any other country (i.e. the other country will see the passport as valid in the official global database): BAM, borders no longer mean anything; welcome to Privileged Accessia.

One company prints identity cards with a hologram to prevent copying. Another company puts on a dot with a crayon.

How about, someone is selling a secure box of some sort, and their factory starts putting glitter nail polish over the screws that hold it together, as is sometimes done for security reasons.

Then the intern decides, “I can just glue these identical little white circles with blue sparkles onto the screw, and it will be faster and I can take more breaks!”

It's like if a manufacturer of bank vaults accidentally let all their vaults be opened by the code 0000

I described it like it was a company selling the highest security locks to companies that needed them, then one day someone discovered you could open the door with a toothpick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNGI1dI-e8 except the password is for everyone's luggage, and it can't be changed

The Hyundai/Kia cars where a USB-A connector fit the lock actuator and was enough to start the car, so enough got stolen that insurance companies stopped issuing policies for them.

It’s like the skeleton key for all the locks in the neighbourhood is actually just a straight metal rod.

concrete manufacture occasionally builds houses.

house collapses and people get injured.

concrete manufacture says we no longer build houses cause it’s too small of a business.

They cut a key for their lock, but instead of using the 4-5 tumblers they only used 1.

Its like finding out that for many years every minuteman silo in north america used the launch code "00000000"

There’s an xkcd for this: https://xkcd.com/221/

we could stick with the metaphor of keys. The modern web requires fancy ones capable of hundreds of notches. The company in question basically skipped the step of notches and just used the blank key

"We're designing/running the lottery. You get to pick the winning numbers, in secret, obviously so no one will know. There are millions of numbers you can pick from, using a random system so it's all trustworthy. Instead of drawing a random ball out, and another and another, you write down the number 4 on a bit of paper and go home for the day thinking it's a job well done. No one noticed because they all expected it to take up to a million guesses, until someone just asked if it was 4"

Ever seen Spaceballs?

“That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage!”

Low quality tech company cuts corners seems pretty on point

Why do you need an analogy? Analogies are always bad. Encryption relies on long complicated numbers, but they made the number instead of long and complicated just the number “4”. Which is actually harder than using a long and complicated number because it’s basically all automated so we don’t even know how They fucked it up this bad.

i explain it by using Donald Trump: There is the atomic football (a case traveling with Trump so he can initiate a atomic war even while playing golf). The combination of the lock an the "Football" obviously is 0-0-0-0-0-0, But Tramp has problems remembering the order of the digits in the combination.

They put a lot of effort into building a very secure safe, thick steel walls, can survive a fire forever, too heavy to move.

Then they locked it with the key you find on a chew toy for a baby.

I'm also wondering who the hell would use a registrar called "eMudhra" with Arial font in the subtext in their logo. It's so incredibly 90s.

I'm actually being serious, I do judge companies by their logo and website design taste, and more modern-looking companies also tend to pay more attention to doing things properly.

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