Saint DUHK, Who Guessed the Throwaway Key

Patron of pseudo-random generators with the key baked into the firmware, FortiGate VPNs, and secrets that were never secret.

Life

On 23 October 2017 Shaanan Cohney, Nadia Heninger and Matthew Green revealed DUHK: some devices, Fortinet's FortiGates among them, used the old ANSI X9.31 generator with a fixed key, hard-coded into the firmware and identical for everyone. Whoever knew it could predict the "random" numbers and decrypt the VPN and TLS traffic those devices protected. The name, "Don't Use Hard-coded Keys", was also the moral.

Prayer

O Saint DUHK, who guesses the dice because you have already seen them, let our keys not be born inside the firmware. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating FortiOS firmware and abandoning random generators with hard-coded keys, wherever they lurk.

A key written in the code is everyone's key.