Vashek Matyas

Home/Magazine Archive/January 2022 (Vol. 65, No. 1)/January 2022 (Vol. 65, No. 1)/Full Text Viewpoint Even If Users Do Not Read Security Directives, Their Behavior Is Not So Catastrophic By Vashek Matyas, Kamil Malinka, Lydia Kraus, Lenka Knapova, Agata Kruzikova Communications of the ACM, January 2022, Vol.

Beta testing is an important phase of product development through which a sample of target users (potential adopters) try a product ahead of its official release. Such testing is practically ubiquitous; in every kind of company, from medicine to software development, participants test and troubleshoot products to help improve their performance and avoid defects. Companies should care who their beta testers are.

A newly discovered vulnerability in generation of RSA keys used by a software library adopted in cryptographic smartcards, security tokens and other secure hardware chips manufactured by Infineon Technologies AG allows for a practical factorization attack, in which the attacker computes the private part of an RSA key. The attack is feasible for commonly used key lengths, including 1024 and 2048 bits, and affects chips manufactured as early as 2012, that are now commonplace.