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pvtmertyesterday at 1:55 PM2 repliesview on HN

From the post itself, I am not sure if the author had sent a patch or some sort of a pull-request to the affected entities. Namely pyaes and aes-js.

The response might've been different if the author had already given a patch, in somewhat backward-compatible way. This doesn't even have to be a functional patch, could be a simple `@warning: usage of default IV will cause insecure storage` similar annotations on the affected functions.

Another thing to remark (and which might've been off-putting for the authors of these libraries) that the author had used term mistakes in various places. Of course in an ideal world, ego should not or would not matter, but these libraries both seem to be quite stale and possibly the authors are having other $DAYJOB responsibilities. Making it difficult to fix things that they just receive complaints about. (I am also guessing these are quite many...)

Again in relation to the points above, it might've been better to say: Cryptography evolves over time, last years' best-practices get outdated, vulnerabilities being found, replaced with newer best-practices of this year. Same will happen next year too. It's not a deliberate mistake or any type of incompetency issue, this is a matter of ever-evolving field that we know and understand better...


Replies

justincormackyesterday at 4:34 PM

This is not about best practises, or something that changed, this has always been something you need to do to make CTR mode actually secure. It was an actual mistake to hard code the IV.

jas-yesterday at 4:44 PM

“ The response might've been different if the author had already given a patch”

For a security related issue? Not sure that is a wise decision.