Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tptacek 5049 days ago
Whoah. That is a good catch. I admit, I skimmed this, saw "hmac_for", thought "I'm not a Perl programmer", and assumed it was HMAC.

Guys, fix this ASAP. SHA1(secret || data) (secret-prefix MAC) is totally insecure. (In practice, every valid forgery to this MAC is going to look like x-y-z-useragent-GIBBERISH-evil-content, but you don't want to be relying on that for your security).

Embarrassing (for me).

2 comments

Thank you! This will be closed up by end of this week. As I wrote in the article and in the presentation, one of main points of open sourcing it is to have people smarter than myself look at the crypto and protocols to find any issues like this. It should be fairly easy to close up.
Glad to have more eyeballs on this. Thanks guys. We're on it.