RNG quality verification

Philipp Gühring pg at futureware.at
Fri Dec 23 10:09:15 EST 2005


Hi Peter,

> Easily solveable bureaucratic problems are much simpler than unsolveable
> mathematical ones.

Perhaps there is some mis-understanding, but I am getting worried that the 
common conception seems to be that it is an unsolveable problem.

What is wrong with the following black-box test?

* Open browser
* Go to a dummy CA´s website
* Let the browser generate a keypair through the <keygen> or cenroll.dll
* Import the generated certificate
* Backup the certificate together with the private key into a PKCS#12 
container
* Extract the private key from the backup
* Extract p and q from the private key
* Extract the random parts of p and q (strip off the first and the last bit)

* Automate the previous steps with some GUI-Automation system

* Concatenate all random bits from all the keypairs together
* Do the usual statistical tests with the random bits

Is this a valid solution, or is the question of the proper usage of random 
numbers in certificate keying material really mathematically unsolveable?

(I am not a RSA specialist yet, I tried to stay away from the bit-wise details 
and the mathematics, so I might be wrong)

But I would really worry, if it is mathematically impossible to attestate the 
correct usage (to a certain extent, I know about the statistical limitations) 
of random numbers with the software I am using to get certificates.

Best regards,
Philipp Gühring


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