Hi,

On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 9:54 PM, Erik Christiansen <dvalin@internode.on.net> wrote:

On 07.05.14 20:34, Brent Wallis wrote:
> On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 7:38 PM, Erik Christiansen

> > That bank cared enough about security to _insist_ on sending a security
> > dongle when a substantial netbank account was opened - they did not
> > wish to accept liability for loss of that amount of funds without the
> > extra security provision.

..

> The dongle was / could have been "keyed" off the private cert of the
> domain...perhaps?

Such dongles merely generate one-time passwords, changing every few
seconds. They are driven by a pseudo-random sequence generator, I figure.
It is trivial to build one into a CMOS chip which runs for years on the
tiny sealed-in battery, yet does not repeat in 100 human lifetimes.

The one weakness, in the event of the account ID and password both being
acquired, is that a lucky crim might randomly guess the token value for
that instant, since that's only 1 in a million.

I agree in part... but remember... 1 in a million is a a simple and solvable challenge for a smart person with an x86 CPU... :-)

IMHO we are yet to see or hear of a serious "Nosebleed" event...perhaps, its already happened and the the worst part in all of this is that will only know after the fact...remember, one of the most insidious issues around this is that there are no detectable fingerprints left by a compromise.

The bug existed for over 12 months prior to revelation.

Any sane admin responsible for TLS/SSL has to assume that it had already been exploited!

I need a hanky:-)