German government Trojan and collateral damage

As you may have heard, the Chaos Computing Club (CCC) reverse engineered a Trojan written by the German government for the purpose of legal wiretapping.

Though the Trojan itself is legal in Germany (as long as it's only installed according to court orders), the CCC unveiled a few embarrassing facts about the Trojan.

The list of issues is long but can be summarized by one point - the Trojan developers didn't make any significant effort to prevent other parties from utilizing the Trojan for their own purposes.

One of the reasons security systems fail is because the designers of the system focused on a single adversary and didn't consider others. In this case it's likely that the designers of this Trojan were focused on ensuring that the Trojan's targets wouldn't identify and remove the Trojan. They didn't realize that their most formidable adversaries aren't the targets but members of the hacker community who are happy for an opportunity to embarrass the government.

More importantly, since the Trojan developers' goal was to "attack" their targets, they didn't realize that at the same time they were still obligated to prevent undue damage to them.

This isn't the first time a security system failed in such a way. Perhaps the most famous case is the Sony Copy Protection rootkit (Wikipedia), which some consider to have been, when revealed, the final nail in the coffin of copy protecting music CDs.

For a security system to succeed it must not cause undue damage. Anything but the tiniest amount of collateral damage is unacceptable and is likely to bring the downfall of the system.

Following the announcement from CCC several anti-virus developers have announced that due to the collateral damage they will be treating this Trojan as malware. The German government developers will need to come up with something new - perhaps they should ask the CCC for some tips.

Two bit attack reduces security effectiveness of AES by 70%!

Now how's that for a sensational headlline? And it's true. A paper released today presents an attack to reduce the computational complexity of brute forcing an AES-128 key to 2 by the power of 126.1 - which means such an attack would take only 30% of the time it would take to do the full 2 by the power of 128 exhaustive search. Similar reductions of about 2 bits are presented for AES-192 and AES-256.

Of course this attack doesn't have any practical impact - such an attack is still completely infeasible - but (as The H writes) it's a first dent in the full AES in other ten years of intensive crytanlysis.

In American slang "two bit" means insignificant - so I guess one could call this a two-bit attack.