Security News > 2022 > November > Breaking the Zeppelin Ransomware Encryption Scheme
The researchers said their break came when they understood that while Zeppelin used three different types of encryption keys to encrypt files, they could undo the whole scheme by factoring or computing just one of them: An ephemeral RSA-512 public key that is randomly generated on each machine it infects.
"If we can recover the RSA-512 Public Key from the registry, we can crack it and get the 256-bit AES Key that encrypts the files!" they wrote.
"The challenge was that they delete the [public key] once the files are fully encrypted. Memory analysis gave us about a 5-minute window after files were encrypted to retrieve this public key."
Unit 221B ultimately built a "Live CD" version of Linux that victims could run on infected systems to extract that RSA-512 key.
From there, they would load the keys into a cluster of 800 CPUs donated by hosting giant Digital Ocean that would then start cracking them.
The company also used that same donated infrastructure to help victims decrypt their data using the recovered keys.