ahomescu1

Right, I see that now. Adding an additional layer of RSA and per-file keys is an interesting twist. Generating a public/private key pair instead of a symmetric key seems to let them encrypt as many files as they want without keeping the private key in memory (which they relied on Windows to erase).

> Just ship your ransomware with the attacker's public key, generate a symmetric key K locally, encrypt the data with K, encrypt K with the public key, offer to decrypt K for a ransom.

It seems that what they're doing is generating a local Kpub/Kpriv pair, encrypting Kpriv itself and then offering to decrypt it. The files are encrypted with Kpub (approximately, see comments below for details). This has the advantage that they can encrypt all they want without knowing Kpriv, which only needs to live in memory long enough to get encrypted.

I don't know the exact details of how WannaCry encrypts the files, but ransomware generally works like this: when hitting a new machine, it generates a random key K1 and then encrypts all the user's files with AES (or some other symmetric key encryption) using K1 as the key. It then encrypts K1 itself using some public key Kpub embedded in the ransomware, then stores the encrypted K1 on disk. When the user pays the ransom, they receive the corresponding private key Kpriv that allows them to decrypt K1, which then lets them decrypt all their files.

I think what this tool does is read the unencrypted K1 directly from memory, which means Kpriv is no longer needed.

EDIT: One correction: the user doesn't receive Kpriv, instead they send the encrypted K1 to the ransomware owner who decrypts it and sends back K1.

There doesn't seem to be anything dynamic about the algorithm in the article. They still need to precompute the perfect hash function(s) from the entire input data, whereas the hashing approach you linked to can handle adding data incrementally (hence the "dynamic" part).

> And who runs foreign policy? How do state secrets work? Is there still a president and a bureaucracy and cabinet ministers?

All of those seem tied to the Executive branch, whereas direct democracy would replace the Legislative (Congress in the US, Parliament in other countries). The current Executive follows the laws that Congress passes, direct democracy wouldn't change that.

I was following and agreeing with you (and was going to upvote you), until the last 2 sentences. You could have made your point without bashing "CS types" and CS/engineering education.

1. and 2. are OK points, but your point 3. is atrocious. In my opinion, destructive behavior isn't really a legitimate form of protest, and as rubidium wrote, you'd be hurting people who are innocent in all this.