Saint FREAK, Raiser of Export-Grade Crypto

Patron of 512-bit RSA keys and the 1990s laws nobody ever really buried.

Life

Child of an era when the United States banned the export of strong cryptography, FREAK (Factoring RSA Export Keys) let whoever sat in the middle of a connection force 512-bit RSA keys, factorable in a few hours with a few hundred dollars of cloud. A bug in OpenSSL, fixed in January 2015, accepted the weak key even when nobody had asked for it.

Prayer

O Saint FREAK, who brought export keys back to life, let our cipher suites look forward and never back. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by disabling every EXPORT cipher suite and toasting the end of the crypto cold war.

Short key, short secret.