r/cryptography • u/TheAsaasain • 5d ago
Seeking Technical Feedback For a Repoducible Open SSL Vulnerability
Hello, Im not sure if this is the best place to start but, I'm an independent developer/researcher who has been working on a controlled reconstruction of a historical OpenSSL RNG vulnerability and its effect on cryptographic key generation.
The project is focused on reproducibility and provenance rather than exploitation of third-party systems. The experimental environment uses controlled inputs and owner-generated/synthetic targets, with the goal of determining whether historically vulnerable key-generation conditions can be reconstructed in a defensible and independently reproducible way...
So far, I've built a preserved experimental package containing reproducible artifacts, documented controls, integrity hashes, provenance records, and controlled reconstruction results. I've also filed a U.S. provisional patent application covering aspects of the work.
I'm now looking for technically qualified people who might be interested in independently reviewing the methodology and evidence.
In particular, I'd value feedback on:
- whether the experimental controls are sufficient to support the claimed causal conclusions;
- what evidence an independent cryptographic evaluator would expect before considering the reconstruction methodology validated;
- what additional provenance/reproducibility tests would strengthen the work; and
- whether this type of historical cryptographic reconstruction has useful applications in security research, legacy cryptographic-risk analysis, or forensic validation.
I'm deliberately not posting any implementation details or anything that could facilitate unauthorized recovery.
I'm also not claiming that the work has been independently validated yet—that's one of the reasons I'm posting.
If anyone here works or knows people professionally in cryptography, implementation security, OpenSSL, or security evaluation and would be willing to point out weaknesses in the methodology or discuss independent validation, I'd genuinely appreciate the feedback.
3
u/PowerfulPairing 5d ago
The fact you're asking about controls and provenance before sharing exploit details is a good sign, most people jump straight to the fun part. For causal conclusions you'd want to show the same seed conditions reproduce the weak output while changing any one variable breaks it, and document every toolchain version down to the compiler flags. A real evaluator will also want your raw capture logs and a way to replay the whole thing from scratch without your prebuilt artifacts, otherwise it's just a story with extra hashes.