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Date:      Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:01:47 +0400
From:      =?koi8-r?B?4c7E0sXKIP7F0s7P1w==?= <ache@nagual.pp.ru>
To:        Kris Kennaway <kris@citusc.usc.edu>
Cc:        Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, Warner Losh <imp@village.org>, current@FreeBSD.ORG, markm@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: entropy reseeding is totally broken
Message-ID:  <20001026140146.B92586@nagual.pp.ru>
In-Reply-To: <20001026022122.C69282@citusc17.usc.edu>; from kris@citusc.usc.edu on Thu, Oct 26, 2000 at 02:21:22AM -0700
References:  <200010241816.MAA17356@harmony.village.org> <200010251035.DAA19676@usr02.primenet.com> <20001025145028.A81143@nagual.pp.ru> <20001026022122.C69282@citusc17.usc.edu>

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On Thu, Oct 26, 2000 at 02:21:22AM -0700, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 02:50:29PM +0400, Andrej Cernov wrote:
> 
> > It is because /dev/random totally ignore _time_ and not reseed from it,
> > but no other randomness source available at boot time. 
> 
> We should probably be using the time since boot as ONE thing we seed
> with, but it only provides maybe 3-4 bits of randomness - meaning if
> thats all you seed with then your attacker has to brute-force 3-4 bits
> of state to break the PRNG state as it was at boot time, hardly a
> difficult challenge :-)

This issue not about cryptographically strong randomness but about
/dev/random seeding totally not worked, even 3-4 bits of time not used
across the boot. Guessing 0 bits for your attacker is much easy then 3-4
bits :-)

-- 
Andrey A. Chernov
http://ache.pp.ru/


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