This is really interesting research. But I'm a little surprised a research group was able to tap the entirety of a large university campus's internet traffic. Is that common?

From the abstract:

> The faulty signatures we observed allowed us to compute private RSA keys associated with a top-10 Alexa site, several browser-trusted wildcard certificates for organizations that used a popular VPN product, and a small sporadic population of other web sites and network devices.

Abstract:

> It is well known in the cryptographic literature that the most common digital signature schemes used in practice can fail catastrophically in the presence of faults during computation. We use passive and active network measurements to analyze organically-occuring faults in billions of digital signatures generated by tens of millions of hosts. We find that a persistent rate of apparent hardware faults in unprotected implementations has resulted in compromised certificate RSA private keys for years. The faulty signatures we observed allowed us to compute private RSA keys associated with a top-10 Alexa site, several browser-trusted wildcard certificates for organizations that used a popular VPN product, and a small sporadic population of other web sites and network devices. These measurements illustrate the fragility of RSA PKCS#1v1.5 signature padding and provide insight on the risks faced by unprotected implementations on hardware at Internet scale.

So these researchers collected ~200 million TLS handshakes, and found a few hundred that were miscomputed, they suspect by bit errors.

However, I do not believe modern computational devices are so unreliable. If I computed 200 million TLS exchanges on my home PC over a few days, I wouldn't expect a single one to be miscomputed. Servers with ECC memory ought to be another order of magnitude more reliable.

So why do we see such high rates of miscomputation?

... wow