Historical cryptographic attacks
11 guides tagged Historical cryptographic attacks, grouped by topic, with the SDLC phase and role each is written for.
- SDLC phases
Identity & cryptography
11 guidesECB mode: why it leaks patterns and what to use instead
Derive exactly what ECB reveals and why a longer key cannot fix it, find where ECB enters real code, and replace it with an authenticated mode.
Design, Development · Developers
Hash collisions and digital signatures: MD5, SHA-1 and what to use
Distinguish collisions from preimages, follow a colliding pair through signing and verification, and retire MD5 and SHA-1 from the verifiers that still accept them.
Maintenance · Developers
Weak RSA key generation: shared primes, ROCA and safe keys
Recover a toy RSA factor with a greatest common divisor, distinguish shared primes, structured primes, duplicate keys and key length, and check a fleet of real public keys.
Maintenance · Developers
RC4 keystream bias
Understand why fresh RC4 keys do not remove keystream bias and how repeated secret positions turn a small statistical effect into evidence.
Design, Development · Developers
64-bit block ciphers and the Sweet32 mechanism
Calculate the birthday effect for 64-bit blocks and derive the CBC relation that can turn a collision into a plaintext disclosure.
Design, Development · Developers
WEP: RC4 key reuse and weak IVs
Separate WEP’s repeated-keystream failure, weak-IV key recovery, and unkeyed integrity weakness through a concrete two-packet exercise.
Design, Development · Developers
Flame: MD5 certificate forgery
Follow how a weak digest and an overpowered certificate trust path enabled forged code-signing authority, without equating the event with RSA key theft.
Design, Release, Maintenance · Developers
Lucky Thirteen and POODLE: two different oracles
Compare two CBC oracles by their signal, protocol rules, and attacker prerequisites instead of treating them as interchangeable padding bugs.
Design, Development · Developers
FREAK and Logjam: export-grade key exchange
Trace two export-grade downgrade paths and separate RSA factorization from finite-field Diffie–Hellman discrete logarithms.
Design, Maintenance · Developers
DROWN: one RSA key across incompatible protocols
Map an RSA key across services to see how an SSLv2 oracle could compromise TLS traffic on a different endpoint.
Design, Development · Developers
Sweet32: the cost of a small block size
Read the 2016 Sweet32 demonstrations as evidence about traffic volume, repeated secrets, and session lifetime rather than treating a block-size threshold as an instant exploit.
Design, Development · Platform engineers and SREs