[Cryptography] What's a Plausible Attack On Random Number Generation?

Albert Lunde atlunde at panix.com
Fri Nov 1 18:39:28 EDT 2013


As a postscript to this thread, I'd note the existence of these older 
open source random number generation projects as an example of prior art:

http://egd.sourceforge.net/

http://prngd.sourceforge.net/

The last revision of the prngd code is 2007. So while this is inspired 
by some good ideas it's not being actively developed today.

They were developed to support Unix/Linux systems which didn't have a 
/dev/random /dev/urandom interface (a diminishing audience).

They use the output of various commands to collect entropy, in a 
configurable-sized pool.

I've used prngd in a previous context where I was administering a web 
server.

A feature is that there is a trivial protocol for requesting random 
bytes in clear text over a TCP socket.

I used that protocol to ship some random bytes from the primary web 
server via private fiber to the hot spare at another location which had 
little traffic.

But our only use of random numbers there was for SSH, neither server 
used HTTPS.

-- 
     Albert Lunde  albert-lunde at northwestern.edu
                   atlunde at panix.com  (address for personal mail)


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