200 PS3 break SSL!

A team of Rebel Security Hackers (researches and academics) with the help of 200 PS3 weapons, the equivalent to 8000 standard cores or $20K of Amazon EC2 time, have broken SSL (Secure Socket Layer), one of the core protocols of the Internet. This attack is possible because of a flaw in MD5. This might convert the entire software galaxy in an unsafe place.

They collected around 30000 trusted certificates from Firefox, 9000 MD5 signed. 97% of them from rapidssl. They builded a fake certificate and transfered the signature to it. The task took around 2 days to complete making use of the 200 PS3. Taking advantage of the known content of the certificate that would be issued by RapidSSL, they predicted two variables: the serial number and the timestamp.

Now, since they control the content of the certificates, they changed the flags to make themselves an intermediate certificate authority. That gave them authority to issue any certificate they wanted. All of these ‘valid’ certs were signed using SHA-1.

You can try their live demo site, you just need to set your clock back to some date before August 2004. This is just a secuirty measure for the example, but it would work identically with any certificate that hasn't expired.

In order to fix this, Certificate Authorities are now using SHA-1 for signing and Microsoft and Mozilla will blacklist the team’s rogue Certificates in their browser but... enough? :s

Here is the project site and for more information here is a more detailed article.

"We're doomed."
C-3PO