Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: /dev/random is probably not
From: Glynn Clements <glynn () gclements plus com>
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2005 15:59:28 +0100
"Zow" Terry Brugger wrote:
It's been a while since I looked at the /dev/random design on Linux (probably the early 2.4 days), however one thing that was quite clear was that they did not use any network I/O as entropy sources because an attacker, particularly one that already had control of other machines on the same LAN segment, could have a high degree of control over that source.
They don't need to have any control; simply being able to observe network traffic means that it is no longer random (in the sense of "unpredictable", which is what counts from a security perspective). -- Glynn Clements <glynn () gclements plus com>
Current thread:
- Re: /dev/random is probably not, (continued)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Thomas (Jul 06)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Darren Reed (Jul 06)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Thomas (Jul 06)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Kai Howells (Jul 08)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Stefan Bethke (Jul 08)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Francesco Messineo (Jul 12)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Anton Ivanov (Jul 05)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not devnull (Jul 06)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Chris Kuethe (Jul 06)
- Re: /dev/random is probably not Thomas (Jul 06)
- RE: /dev/random is probably not David Schwartz (Jul 08)