CPRNGs are still an issue.

[James A. Donald]

Jack Lloyd wrote:
 > I think the situation is even worse outside of the
 > major projects (the OS kernels crypto implementations
 > and the main crypto libraries). I think outside of
 > those, nobody is even really looking. For instance -
 >
 > This afternoon I took a look at a C++ library called
 > JUCE which offers (among a pile of other things) RSA
 > and Blowfish. However it turns out that all of the RSA
 > keys are generated with an LCRNG (lrand48, basically)
 > seeded with the time in milliseconds.
 > 
http://www.randombit.net/bitbashing/security/juce_rng_vulnerability.html

If one uses a higher resolution counter - sub
microsecond - and times multiple disk accesses, one gets
true physical randomness, since disk access times are
effected by turbulence, which is physically true
random.

In Crypto Kong I added entropy at various times during
program initialization from the 64 bit performance
counter.  Unfortunately the 64 bit performance counter
is not guaranteed to be present, so I also obtained
entropy from a wide variety of other sources - including
the dreaded millisecond counter that has caused so many
security holes.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com