Category Archives: People

Weak 4096 Bit RSA Key in Strong Set Factored, More Factored Keys Follow

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Update: No Such lAbs reports that other Phuctored keys have valid signatures.

Update 2: More factored RSA Keys and their purported owners have been disclosed

This morning the Phuctor operated by No Such lAbs broke its first RSA key. The compromised key in question which was a 4096 bit key which had a subkey divisible by 231, which is further divisible by 3, 7, and 11. This factorization was shortly followed by two other factorizations of identifiable keys. Each identifiable key has a companion which is similarly weak but they have yet to be identified. Continue reading →

Liberland "President" Arrested

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Croatian forces have reportedly arrested the founder and "President" of Liberland Vít Jedlička. Jedlička founded Liberland in a disputed stretch of territory along the Danube river between Serbia and Croatia and declared Bitcoin the official currency. The micronation of Liberland has only a month of history and given present opposition it seems unlikely to enjoy the longevity of the Principality of Hutt River or Sealand. Given Liberland's geographic situation prospects for establishing lasting security seem unlikely.

Bitcoin ISP Unveiled

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Today Mircea Popescu announced the creation of a Bitcoin Internet Service Provider adding to the increasing amount of infrastructure outside of the fiat regime's grasp and available to those aligned with Bitcoin's Most Serene Republic. The Bitcoin Internet Service Provider rather than offering any sort of shared or virtualized product instead offers raw metal, dedicated servers for which customers may have a Linux of their choice provisioned. Any system administration beyond provisioning a server is the responsibility of the customer, though some limited support may be provided and referrals for further service may be offered. Continue reading →

ItBit Unveils New Board Confirming Qntra Report

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Today New York based ItBit exchange unveiled its new board and charter to operate as a financial services company from the New York Department of Financial Services. ItBit's announcement today confirms Qntra's April 16th report that former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chair Sheila Blair has joined ItBit's corporate board. Among those joining Blair is former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley. ItBit insists its charter from New York allows it to legally operate in all 50 members of the United States in spite of Federalism. CoinBase earlier announced licensing to operate as an exchange in all 50 states, an assertion which was later found to be questionable. Continue reading →

Phuctor Begins Processing SKS Keyserver Dump

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The Phuctor, a service for testing the strength of RSA public keys used by the Gnu Privacy Guard and other PGP encryption software has begun digesting the output of an SKS keyserver's public key inventory. The Phuctor is a service provided by No Such lAbs. As of the time of this publication the Phuctor has processed more than 6500 public keys and found 60 with one or more duplicate moduli.1 The Phuctor, as announced on Stanislav "asciilifeform" Datskovskiy's blog Loper OS utilizes Euclid's algorithm for testing the quality of RSA moduli. The Phuctor has already been integrated into the Web of Trust explorers for both the #bitcoin-otc and #bitcoin-assets WoTs allowing users to check the key quality of potential counterparties. As the number of keys processed by the Phuctor increases the quality of feedback in can provide for keys already in its database grows.

  1. Likely the same keys found in different places or with different information attached.  ↩

Deep Web Marketplace Go-Betweener Faces 20 Years Jail

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Having previously plead not guilty to charges related to the arbitrage of drugs purchased via the deep web and sold to IRL customers, 23 year old Joseph Patrick Gelli of Lexington, South Carolina last week plead guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Count 12, to which Gelli plead guilty, states that between June 2013 through to July 2014 Gelli purchased bitcoin from Coinbase in order to facilitate the purchase of drugs via an unnamed deep web marketplace so that it could later be onsold for a profit. Continue reading →

BitGo Files MultiSig Patent Application Joining Other Bitcoin Patent Parasites

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An application has been filed (local mirror) with the United States Patent and Trademark office by Bitgo Inc. of San Francisco which if accepted would assign patent rights over the process behind Bitcoin multiple signature addresses to BitGo. Titled "Virtual Currency Address Security" the application lists Michael A. Belshe and Joseph William Lee as inventors of the technology. A proof of concept implementation of multi signature addresses was incorporated into the BitcoinJS library in November of 2013. Continue reading →

Google Password Alert Already Subverted

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This week Google released a browser extension designed to warn users when they enter their Google password on any page that is not controlled by Google, and this piece of security theater has already been subverted. Researcher Paul Moore has already created of Proof of Concept (Not a Google Login Page) which subverts the browser extension using a few lines of Javascript. The snippet of Javascript in question is below:

<!-- BYPASS GOOGLE'S PASSWORD ALERT "PROTECTION" -->
<script type="text/javascript">
  setInterval(function() {
    if(document.getElementById("warning_banner")) {
      document.getElementById("warning_banner").remove();
    }
}, 5);