big endian sword

Big Indian*

It should be a tiny knife instead

Ok ik afraid to ask, but what's with all the crypto jokes about a number 4? Was this related to some recent breach?

Yes. It was found that some private keys weren’t as secure as expected, one was found to be just the number 4 where keys should be hundreds of characters long.

This is the context: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/the-internet-goes-on-high-alert-after-discovery-of-8-compromised-tls-certs/

Thanks. That's incredible. How do you generate a key with the number 4 lol? Generate it then delete everything and replace or with a4?

I don't know but anything is possible, especially in the age of AI. My guess is that there was some code that accepted a "size" for a key because "everything needs to be configurable", and someone just figured to put in 1 because "well I want a 1 key sized key". One of the results was 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:04.

You roll 1d4

People are speculating they used some educational software by mistake.

My guess is they understood that they were supposed to generate a random key but didn't know how to do it properly and instead of using a cryptographically secure method that involves large prime numbers, ended up using a single randomized byte.

Though even that might be more complicated than what they did, because it's also possible they just manually created them, maybe approaching it as a "this will be a shared resource in this office so let's make it easy to share".

Or maybe it was deliberately made unsecure to allow other fuckery, like spying on anyone using one of those keys or using the ability to sign certificates with a trusted cert.