Blessed MEGA-awry, Who Opened the Encrypted Vault

Patron of encrypted storage, home-made cryptography, and customers who trust the cloud.

Life

In June 2022 Matilda Backendal, Miro Haller and Kenneth Paterson of ETH Zurich showed a string of flaws in the cryptography of MEGA, the cloud service that promised user-controlled encryption. A malicious server, after enough logins, could recover the customer's RSA key and then decrypt their files and forge new ones. The promise was that not even MEGA could read the data; the demonstration said otherwise.

Prayer

O Blessed MEGA-awry, who takes apart home-built encryption, teach us to have our cryptography reviewed before we promise it. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating the MEGA client and handing your cryptographic schemes to those who can break them, before anyone else does.

A home-made vault keeps a key the owner can find again.