Having worked around these types of devices and their interfaces, I doubt they intended to create weak keys.

It is more likely they had a script which placed a parameter in the wrong field, due to something like using positional arguments. Or they misread the documentation for some interface.

Still incompetence. And I would love to see my theory confirmed or refuted.

The previous discussion advanced the theory that they fucked up the string handling. Eg in Python, output = key[0] would result in one-byte keys like "4" if you expect "key" to be an array, but it's actually a string.

I hear you in terms of how these kinds of mistakes typically happen. But why did the script ever produce two sets of keys? The initial root cause was somebody picked the weak key not the strong key. But what was the reason for ever producing a weak key in the first place? They say the script produced two outputs - what on earth for??

I mean, why have the ability to generate weak keys to begin with? Serious question, I've never done this sort of work. What sort of utility does that bring to the procedures and workflows one does in that line of work?

If you didn't know better, you'd think this had been done on purpose by some three-letter agency.