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Comment by sanqui | Hacker News Reader

Firefox Developer Edition, which is on 40.0, is also reported as vulnerable.

It's a bit strange this was published while the vulnerability isn't patched for the majority of users out there. Browsers vendors don't tend to lag security fixes, so why no responsible disclosure?

Or is this just not really a browser issue, and held back on the browser side because blocking insecure ciphers breaks most of the internet?

> so why no responsible disclosure?

Presumably because the main danger here comes from state-level adversaries who already know and actively exploit the issue, not script kiddies who might get funny ideas after reading the announcement. So the sooner it is published and people can start fixing their servers and clients, the less damage is done.

Yeah, a big part of the risk here is that someone might spend a couple million dollars and have a form of this capability up and running within a couple of months (and that governments may have done that by around 2010). If you want to improve your crypto, you can probably roll out a better configuration much faster than new adversaries can get these capabilities up and running. (Except for this Java compatibility problem, maybe.)

Because this isn't really an attack per se. There are some interesting things in the paper, but really this is just low grade crypto being tolerated for far too long in the name of compatibility.

I finally found the Mozilla bug entry for this, they've known of it since 2010 when they raised the minimums to 512-bit DH groups.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587407

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