Windows 7: RSA Key Blocking is Coming

Source

A Guy

While higher bits are great for security, I just checked and the highest that Opera uses, which I imagine is still higher than other browsers, is only 256 bit. It sounds to me that MS is attempting to block all encryption.

@seekermeister: IE9 also uses 256-bit.

I'll probably just skip the update, personally; the ramifications here are overbearing and potentially disruptive and I don't see any real-world benefit from forcing 1024-bit minimum, it's not like we can't use 1024-bit encryption and up without this update.

Yes, but skipping the update doesn't necessarily eliminate the problem, because I would bet that the servers on many websites will get it, and that would prevent them from using the lower bit rate to work with the user browsers. Opera used to have a little padlock icon to indicate when encryption was functioning, but I don't find it now.

EDIT: Found it! They now have it appear in the address field when going to a secure website.

What you're looking at isn't the RSA encryption. It's the AES encryption, which comes in 128, 192 and 256 bit variants.

The RSA key is something else and is the public and private keys used. RSA is used to authenticate users. When you send an encrypted message, to say a server. The server will have the private RSA key. A client will send the encrypted message, as well as the public RSA key they hold. You need the public and private key to match up to be able to communicate. RSA keys nowadays use between 1024 bit and 4096 bit key sizes, so the update will stop smaller key sizes being used.

And I don't see it affecting much. All that needs to be changed after is new keys generated with a higher cryptography.

Thanks Harry, I knew the gist of that, but every explanation I found was way to geeky

A Guy

You're welcome, it can get all quite confusing lol.

So...What does this mean for the average home user like me, will it be invisible or at some point down the road rear its head to bite me?

I tried the CMD in an elevated CMD window, and it must of ran, because it went right back to C:\Windows\system32> with no results, and without me having to touch return.

I imagine I have no templates. Is that good or bad?

Just means when using an SSL connection that no keys under 1024 bits can be used for authentication.