Security and FUD Leftovers
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Security updates for Tuesday [LWN.net]
Security updates have been issued by Oracle (bcel), SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, glibc, minetest, multimon-ng, nautilus, ovmf, python-Django, samba, saphanabootstrap-formula, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (usbredir).
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Breaking RSA with a Quantum Computer - Schneier on Security
A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong.
We have long known from Shor’s algorithm that factoring with a quantum computer is easy. But it takes a big quantum computer, on the orders of millions of qbits, to factor anything resembling the key sizes we use today. What the researchers have done is combine classical lattice reduction factoring techniques with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm. This means that they only need a quantum computer with 372 qbits, which is well within what’s possible today. (The IBM Osprey is a 433-qbit quantum computer, for example. Others are on their way as well.)
The Chinese group didn’t have that large a quantum computer to work with. They were able to factor 48-bit numbers using a 10-qbit quantum computer. And while there are always potential problems when scaling something like this up by a factor of 50, there are no obvious barriers.
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WordPress Sites Under Attack from Newly Found Linux Trojan [Ed: The problem here is neither Linux nor WordPress but unpatched plugins. Misleading 'journalism', calling everything "Linux" when it is negative.]
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Newly discovered Linux vulnerability rated 10 in severity [Ed: This headline is incorrect. It's not severity 10.]