Post #3001363

2026-05-28 08:32 UTC

OMG. Apparently tons of people have been generating secrets on an old server-side key generation website that had incredibly weak entropy. Like, 10 bits or something. The website was allkeysgenerator[.]com. Here is a dump of 1000 keys generated on it. Searching for the URL finds hundreds of people recommending it for key generation. Some of these snippets have hundreds of GitHub results. The exact algorithm is unknown but (see below) It generates extremely predictable strings, you can visually see how the delta from character to character is almost constant. Thanks @dramforever for doing some analysis here. Their script here can generate the vast majority of sequences from this website. Update: This script generates the entire list from a single seed, and large chunks of another. I'm certain you can break into production websites using these keys for cookie signing etc.

Replies (16)

@lina@vt.social 2026-05-28 14:31

OK, I have a generator. It's a float-based algorithm, so there's rounding error issues, but this script works for the above 1000-key dump, and for a contiguous chunk of another pastebin I found with longer keys. https://gist.github.com/hoshinolina/7630ca303bcd649b8222e9abd8920caf @dramforever@mastodon.social

Open ##3257583
@kouett@soc.kouett.net.eu.org 2026-05-28 09:46

@lina@vt.social sounds like nsa psyop or whatev. not the 1st time someones deploys broken cryptosystem on purpose

Open ##3257584
@disorderlyf@todon.eu 2026-05-28 10:21

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social Is this why it seems like everything is being compromised left, right, and centre?

Open ##3257586
@0x2ba22e11@unstable.systems 2026-05-28 11:15

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social WAHT really. WHAT!?????

Open ##3257587
@forthy42@mastodon.net2o.de 2026-05-28 11:41

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social BTW: never ever let a third party generate a secret. You can use third-party random number generators to generate random non-secrets. But make sure they have a better entropy source than you have.

Open ##3257589
@linuxandyarn@hachyderm.io 2026-05-28 14:26

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social Eeeeek. (Deleted reference to DDG's implementation of pwgen)

Open ##3257590
@paulehoffman@infosec.exchange 2026-05-28 14:55

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social Paging @badkeys@infosec.exchange

Open ##3257600
@lunacb@wetdry.world 2026-05-28 16:10

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social a web search for "ssh key generator" or similar produces a lot of results like this, its very funny

Open ##3257601
@clayote@peoplemaking.games 2026-05-30 06:13

@drwho@masto.hackers.town @argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org @lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social Some people do not own the computer they're registering the account with. Might be a library computer, or they're a minor and it's a family computer they haven't been given permissions to install anything on. If it's a phone, same, but in any case, trusting whatever password generator you find on the app store isn't necessarily more secure than trusting a sketchy website.

Open ##3257602
@astraleureka@social.treehouse.systems 2026-05-28 17:17

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social ... how did these people miss the most critical part of "not your keys, not your secrets" ??? isn't that like, cryptography 101

Open ##3257603
@esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club 2026-05-29 09:25

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social why would anyone generate keys with a website when one can use pwgen or any other similar tool?

Open ##3257604
@hanako@nightcord.de 2026-05-29 19:29

@lina@vt.social Well I just use openssl or the generator in bitwarden.

Open ##3257605
@Sobex@social.sciences.re 2026-05-30 05:13

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social Who built and operates this bad website ? (This reminds me a bit too much of Debian’s bad PRNG story, which involved a three letter agency ?)

Open ##3257606
@gabriel@mastodon.samfira.com 2026-05-30 05:22

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social I mean.... Even something like this is better than trusting some random website to generate your secrets..... function genRandomString() { LEN=${1:-16} tr -dc "a-zA-Z0-9!@#$%^&*()_+?><~\`;'" < /dev/urandom | head -c $LEN; echo '' }

Open ##3257607
@stiiin@infosec.space 2026-05-30 05:58

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social See, this is exactly why the Web Cryptography APIs have been mildly syntactically salted under the name "subtle". The API that most people should use ought to mistake-proof the process of picking a key, and block well-known sets of keys like these.

Open ##3257608
@ledoian@pleroma.ledoian.cz 2026-05-30 08:24

@lina@vt.social @dramforever@mastodon.social why does it feel like people, even those supposed to be tech savvy, just don't care about what they are doing and how the things they do is supposed to work? it's extremely stupid for secret generation, but even for stuff like “how do i convert X to Y” i tend to get search results for webpages that do that for me (serving me ads and possibly some malware), instead of the one-liner that is actually doing the same thing… like, i guess understanding the sheer complexity of computers is not easy, especially when self-taught (i started like 15 years ago, have some formal education in IT and still have stuff i don't understand properly). but not understanding who a secret is shared with and why it shouldn't is possibly a next level…

Open ##3257609