Linux RNG paper

[Steven M. Bellovin]

On Thu, 04 May 2006 18:14:09 +0200, markus reichelt <ml at mareichelt.de>
wrote:

> * "Travis H." <solinym at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > 1) In the paper, he mentions that the state file could be altered
> > by an attacker, and then he'd know the state when it first came up. 
> > Of course, if he could do that, he could simply install a trojan in
> > the OS itself, so this is not really that much of a concern.  If
> > your hard drives might be altered by malicious parties, you should
> > be using some kind of cryptographic integrity check on the contents
> > before using them.  This often comes for free when encrypting the
> > contents.
> 
> Agreed; but regarding unix systems, I know of none crypto
> implementation that does integrity checking. Not just de/encrypt the
> data, but verify that the encrypted data has not been tampered with.
> 
See "Space-Efficient Block Storage Integrity", Alina Oprea, Mike Reiter,
Ke Yang, NDSS 2005,
http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ndss/05/proceedings/papers/storageint.pdf


--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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