Security Week in Review (2007-04-20)

Sunday, May 27. 2007

Security Week in Review (2007-04-20)

A Mighty Number Falls
There was much news last week regarding the factoring of a 307 digit number. Wikipedia has a nice example of what factoring means for the RSA algorithm.

This event is probably not newsworthy to most people, but it's a huge feat for those in the encryption industry. The researchers took 11 months to factor this number. This seems like a very long time, but when you take Moore's Law into account, this 11 months will be a couple of days in several years. The moral of the story is that data strongly encrypted today, can be broken tomorrow.

28% of software is unpatched
Secunia published a report stating that 28% of software installed on a users computer is unpatched.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Secunia_28_Percent_of_Software_Unpatched/1179508037

This can be a serious problem when you have to rely on more than one vendor for your updates. The article doesn't specify it, but it seems this survey was conducted on Windows computers. One of the problems that exists in the Windows universe is that every third party vendor has their own (if any) update system. A system such as yum which supports multiple repositories, GPG signed packages, and a single update mechanism can be a huge advantage.
Ideally for a non technical desktop user, their update system should automatically update software on a regular basis. This is the behavior seen when a windows user install Firefox, and it has proven to be rather successful. In the above study, only 5.4% of Firefox users were not running the latest secure version. I suspect few other software projects can boast such numbers. Whether you agree with this method or not, there is no denying it does work.

Posted by Josh Bressers in Security Week in Review at 22:00 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Just for fun, let's do the calculation of how long it will be to factor a 307 digit number in "a couple days" assuming Moore's law holds.

Moore's law is that the "number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months". Or, double computational power every 24 months.

Let's take "a couple days" to mean 3 days, and 11 months equals 330 days. I calculate it will take 14 years. Scary.

#1 jpl on 2007-05-28 16:11 (Reply)

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