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by paulddraper 2652 days ago
Yes, now certificates are about half as hard to hack as they were supposed to be.
2 comments

Well, it depends on what you mean by "hack."

The attack that we're talking about here isn't breaking a signature, but relies instead on being able to manipulate certificate data to generate a certificate with a known hash. That hash must collide with another certificate hash, which would then let you generate a rogue certificate.

A team demonstrated that this attack was possible by being able to issue a rogue cert by being able to predict the not_before and not_after on the certificate that would be issued, predicting the serial of the issued cert, and finding an input for the rest of the cert fields which caused a collision.

https://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

So, yes 128 bit serials would be better, but we should be safe even at 63 bits of entropy.

Does that mean that twice as many will be cracked?/s