Journal article

Where did I leave my keys? Lessons from the juniper dual EC incident

S Checkoway, J Maskiewicz, C Garman, J Fried, S Cohney, M Green, N Heninger, RP Weinmann, E Rescorla, H Shacham

Communications of the ACM | ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY | Published : 2018

Abstract

In December 2015, Juniper Networks announced multiple security vulnerabilities stemming from unauthorized code in ScreenOS, the operating system for their NetScreen Virtual Private Network (VPN) routers. The more sophisticated of these vulnerabilities was a passive VPN decryption capability, enabled by a change to one of the parameters used by the Dual Elliptic Curve (EC) pseudorandom number generator. In this paper, we described the results of a full independent analysis of the ScreenOS randomness and VPN key establishment protocol subsystems, which we carried out in response to this incident. While Dual EC is known to be insecure against an attacker who can choose the elliptic curve parame..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by National Science Foundation


Funding Acknowledgements

This material is based in part upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under awards EFMA-1441209, CNS-1505799, CNS-1010928, CNS-1408734, and CNS-1410031; The Mozilla Foundation; a gift from Cisco; and the Office of Naval Research under contract N00014-14-1-0333.