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Ah, sorry. I got confused by this section on shattered.it, which seemed to be saying that merely requiring a certain level of entropy in the resulting documents would be enough to mitigate the attack:

> Are TLS/SSL certificates at risk? [...] it is required that certificate authorities insert at least 20 bits of randomness inside the serial number field. If properly implemented this helps preventing a practical exploitation.

After giving it a bit more thought though, I realize now though that this mitigation actually works by preventing the attacker from fully controlling the hash of the first, non-malicious document.



The project's site is referring to an outdated version of the requirement. As I noted above, the requirement they refer to is only a SHOULD (some CAs might not have complied with it) and was replaced at the end of September with a SHALL which requires 64 bits rather than 20.

https://cabforum.org/2016/07/08/ballot-164/

Edit: I told them about this and they've fixed it; it now says "64 bits" instead of "20 bits".


CA certs are different than the general case.




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