I’ve asked Claude to read this article for me and explain it to me. Somehow that makes it better, as then at least I know I’m talking to an AI:
“The fix closed two chained flaws in RouterOS’s shared crypto and login libraries: a lax PKCS#1 v1.5 RSA signature verifier that failed to enforce the total encoded length (256 bytes) or pin the digest to its correct length for the claimed hash, allowing an attacker to forge a valid-looking signature without the private key — a pre-auth authentication bypass sitting on SSH public-key auth, IPsec/IKE, and TLS simultaneously.
“The second flaw was missing input validation on the terminal-login username path (SSH, Telnet, MAC-Telnet), which permitted argument injection (a leading -) and control-character/log-forging injection.
“Chained, the forged-signature auth bypass plus the hostile login-parameter handling turned an unauthenticated network position into a path toward code execution, which is why MikroTik backported it silently across all branches on the same day.”
I'm so weary of seeing Claude-isms everywhere. It makes everything so much more of a cognitive burden to read, whether you're reading for leisure or comprehension.
The info was also almost certainly not human authored. AI is almost certainly capable of writing this up given a prompt like "explain what this security update is about. Format it as a blog post."
Why not just post the info you want to convey and the prompt? It would be easier for everyone involved.
“The fix closed two chained flaws in RouterOS’s shared crypto and login libraries: a lax PKCS#1 v1.5 RSA signature verifier that failed to enforce the total encoded length (256 bytes) or pin the digest to its correct length for the claimed hash, allowing an attacker to forge a valid-looking signature without the private key — a pre-auth authentication bypass sitting on SSH public-key auth, IPsec/IKE, and TLS simultaneously.
“The second flaw was missing input validation on the terminal-login username path (SSH, Telnet, MAC-Telnet), which permitted argument injection (a leading -) and control-character/log-forging injection.
“Chained, the forged-signature auth bypass plus the hostile login-parameter handling turned an unauthenticated network position into a path toward code execution, which is why MikroTik backported it silently across all branches on the same day.”