questions about RNGs and FIPS 140

Steven Bellovin smb at cs.columbia.edu
Wed Aug 25 23:46:00 EDT 2010


On Aug 25, 2010, at 4:37 16PM, travis+ml-cryptography at subspacefield.org wrote:

> 
> 3) Is determinism a good idea?
> See Debian OpenSSL fiasco.  I have heard Nevada gaming commission
> regulations require non-determinism for obvious reasons.

It's worth noting that the issue of determinism vs. non-determinism is by no means clearcut.  You yourself state that FIPS 140-2 requires deterministic PRNGs; I think one can rest assured that the NSA had a lot of input into that spec.  The Clipper chip programming facility used a PRNG to set the unit key -- and for good reasons, not bad ones.

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





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