alt Hacker NewsI wonder how someone stumbled upon this - maybe leaked by someone inside eMudhra?
Since there's nothing to indicate that the private key was all zeroes and one non-zero lsbyte, and presumably nobody would try to brute-force a private key.
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I suspect that they read the article last Friday about Claude finding the origin of the ECDSA constants. That was only a few hours before Google received the vulnerability report.
The two cases are very similar. The only difference is that the weak randomness was harmless in the earlier story, and here it’s devastating.
Of the thousands of people bored with a swarm of AI agents, is it not plausible that somebody would just say "hey, let's do a vibe check to see whether any CAs are trivially crackable"?
> and presumably nobody would try to brute-force a private key.
Why not? There are examples of RNGs providing very poor entropy which might be a reason to check it (looking at you Sony).
This question seems to be answered in another comment now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180284