It's not quite as egregious as someone purposely choosing the key. According to the write up on the Mozilla bugtracker there was a bug in the script used for there key generation ceremony which caused the bad certificates to be generated. Obviously completely unacceptable for a CA, but makes more sense than someone plucking 4 out of the air while generating a root cert.

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xmcp123 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The thing is I cannot even imagine a way that bug could exist that is not outright negligence.

A unit test becoming prod data? That’s really all I’ve got and that’s pretty unforgivable.

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__MatrixMan__ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's easier to imagine if it was malicious.

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kijin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've integrated with production APIs that tell the client to encrypt sensitive data using an IV consisting of 16 null bytes.

Some people just follow a spec and don't stop to think what that spec is supposed to accomplish.

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shadowgovt 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Correct. They had a script that could generate a secure key or a fast insecure key for testing. The script generated both at the same time.

Human error was selecting the wrong output file and promoting it forward.

It's not at all the kind of thing you want to see in a reliable, secure, mature process... There shouldn't be a step where a human even makes a choice there.

And it's exactly the kind of thing most companies are doing, most of the time, more often than we would like.

An awful lot of the world runs on spit and bailing wire and things too easy to automate yet, and the parts that don't cost more.

	▲	cyberpunk 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ever dealt with key generation on a HSM? Thousand line shell scripts that use expect to drive 30+ answers to a multi-choice interactive tui (that only works on one version of redhat from 2008 or something) is not so unusual, can totally understand how it happened. No excuses in that though.
	▲	AlotOfReading 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Why would you need a fast insecure key at all though? Just use a real key. Key generation for an ECC curve should be lightning fast.

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adrian17 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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