Research Group Cracks Taiwan's National "Smart Card" Digital Certificates

Ironically, it is often the ineptitude and incompetence of our security protocols that leave us the most insecure.  Is there anyone more vulnerable to attack that the person who thinks they are invulnerable because they have received reassuring platitudes and slogans from those running the security racket?  From Smart Facts, a report by a group of international researchers:  

An attacker can efficiently factor at least 184 distinct 1024-bit RSA keys from Taiwan's national "Citizen Digital Certificate" database. The big story here is that these keys were generated by government-issued smart cards that were certified secure. The certificates had all the usual buzzwords: FIPS certification from NIST (U.S. government) and CSE (Canadian government), and Common Criteria certification from BSI (German government).

These 184 keys include 103 keys that share primes and that are efficiently factored by a batch-GCD computation. This is the same type of computation that was used last year by two independent teams (USENIX Security 2012: Heninger, Durumeric, Wustrow, Halderman; Crypto 2012: Lenstra, Hughes, Augier, Bos, Kleinjung, Wachter) to factor tens of thousands of cryptographic keys on the Internet.

The remaining 81 keys do not share primes. Factoring these 81 keys requires taking deeper advantage of randomness-generation failures: first using the shared primes as a springboard to characterize the failures, and then using Coppersmith-type partial-key-recovery attacks. This is the first successful public application of Coppersmith-type attacks to keys found in the wild.

Source:http://blog.agupieware.com/2013/09/research-group-cracks-taiwans-national.html