Full Disclosure mailing list archives

Re: Working exploit for Debian generated SSH Keys


From: Michael Holstein <michael.holstein () csuohio edu>
Date: Tue, 20 May 2008 13:41:41 -0400


Generating real pseudo-random streams is a hard problem which is way
more than what people can handle. Usually, PRNGs are composed of
various periodic elements which, in the end, all combined produce a
repeating stream of pseudo-random numbers. OpenSSL uses a modified MAC
for this as a state machine and extracts some state bits as random
stream on every access.
  

Smoke Detector + Webcam = cheapo RNG

http://inventgeek.com/Projects/alpharad/overview.aspx

I know some highly secure operations (eg: web casinos, using Geiger 
counters and background radiation) use a version of this for their RNGs, 
and random.org does it with RF (radios listening to static) .. do 
patches exist for OpenSSL to use hardware devices? (short of a hack to 
take something like the above and pipe it to /dev/random, etc).

Cheers,

Michael Holstein
Cleveland State University

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