How I Tripped Over the Debian Weak Keys Vulnerability

Next month will mark the 16th anniversary of the disclosure of a major vulnerability in the Debian OpenSSL package that resulted in predictable private keys. In 2008, a solution was implemented at Engine Yard to address slow SSH login times for GitHub users, involving patching OpenSSH to lookup keys in a MySQL database. However, a month later, users were able to access other users' repositories over SSH due to key collisions caused by the Debian weak keys vulnerability.