The argument given at the time was that if it was captured and copied the chances are that the adversery would not know about the relative security of the keys, and would in all probability end up predominantly using the relativly insecure keys. Likewise the possability of weakness in other Crypto AG ciphers suposedly put in by the NSA has been debated on numerous occasions. It has been further suggested that the NSA had no input other than to tell the IBM design team to keep their mouths shut for the sake of National Security.
Oddly the NSA assumed that DES would only be put in hardware and that they could control the technology supply to banks and the like. It has been said that it was one of their biggest publicaly known mistakes, it realy was responsible for kick starting the computer security industry and Universities delving into Crypto research.
In June they declasified the Skipjack algorithm and interestingly although it is secure in the implimentation the NSA released it is very brittle in that even very minor changes to the algorithm can weaken it greatly. However, somebody I forgot his name, sorry — David Hoye? My guess is purely legal.
At that time, effective crypto meant hardware. Nobody thought of software. Now, a law to be enforceable has to be fairly specific. It was a gap in the law. Sometime in the early 80s somebody recognized the same gap I did, and software crypto was added to ITAR. Further, the Munitions Control Board extended the definition of cryptographic devices and software to include cryptanalytic devices and software in one of its bulletins. At least, that is my surmise. Thus, the insistence on hardware. Is this sort of bias something that the NSA might expect the research community to detect?
We have no way of knowing whether an NSA employee working on his own came up with the constants—and has the secret numbers. Bruce, the absence of proof is not proof of wrongdoing in this case. You are however presenting this lack of knowledge as if it were proof that wrongdoing is occurring. You have a tendency to think that your questions, opinions, and worries are the rational ones. We should think in a new line.
Give me some DRNGs that we can use for many things. Would that help in determining the secret numbers? Very important news! The spooks already have the backdoor, frontdoor, sidedoor and the basement key. There cannot be any proof given about this, neither that this is not the case, so Bruce is asking to be cautious, and since there are other and better alternatives, it is a no-brainer to use them instead.
That you have to point out that Bruce is not the only authority on security topics although I fail to see why it is relevant to mention that tells me that this is more of a personal problem you have with Bruce, than anything else. Intel includes a hardware random number generator starting with the Ivy Bridge chip. Google brings up plenty of articles, such as this.
What if ephemeral DH elliptic curve keys are always generated by this generator? Who developed the constants?
They lo-o-o-o-v-e car wrecks. Further the basic entropy generator is very likely to be subject to significant bias and noise that is not actually unpredictable think powersupply noise it is mainly dependent on the input source and load conditions all of which are either measurable or influanceable. You are realy a hero of cryptograph world!
You are really awesome Schneier as stated above in the comments in fact it is a backdoor for the NSA! You were right to worry. Good advice too. Yet, it makes perfect sense if they think they can pay major crypto providers a lot of money to use it. And then they have easy access to so many communications. Just like marketing winning over technical superiority in commercial sector. Subscribe to comments on this entry. Remember personal info? This is scary stuff indeed. So, the latest NIST standard may prove excellent for general use, but remain suspect for crypto.
That is nothing new. How times change. The recommendation to use other generators is, of course, relative. Star 4. Branches Tags. Could not load branches. Could not load tags. Latest commit. Git stats 66 commits. Windows has a mechanism for configuring the default RNG algorithm to be used by various parts of the system. The default configurations for Windows 8. DRBGs rely on entropy to provide secure random number generation.
Good entropy typically depends on hardware and other factors to ensure its randomness. Most applications rely on the platform to provide secure random numbers. I would expect that Chrome and Firefox would use the BCryptGenRandom to generate secure random numbers on Windows; however, each respective development team is more authoritative on how they generate random numbers when their browsers run on the Windows platform.
According to the BCryptGenRandom documentation. Windows Vista : The random number generator is based on the hash-based random number generator specified in the FIPS standard. An obvious questions is if this is actually the random number generator running. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.
Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 3 months ago. What was happening was that the programer had used malloc to create a buffer into which the password file was read. When that part of the prog had finished it released the memory.
The program then almost imediately called malloc to create a new buffer and was handed a pointer back to the memory that had been previously used. The solution was to replace malloc with calloc. However you should not use any of the malloc family in this way as they will still not clear the data from the buffer when you free it and there is no gaurenty that other parts of the program or other programs will not get handed the memory with the data in it.
The correct thing to do is to clear all alloced memory before you free it also make sure that compiler does not optimize this step out. As you can apriciate this is a real problem in Object Orientated programing and code that uses multithreading. Oh and finaly if you still want to do it please do not come running back with tails of woe about how you product was compromised. At the moment I am not exactly at the point to see the backdoor clearly.
The call of simple rand to generate a random number, for example as a password key for AES to be transfered to the client through a DH channel seems to be a bad idea, because the rand algorithm must be initialisied, and if the initialised number is known, everything is broken.
Even if the backdoor will send the random number to NSA by internet, they will only know one random number before the hash function.
Where exactly is the problem in this case, if nobody really knows if there is backdoor or not. If there is no backdoor, the source of a new probably good random algorithm is born. If there is a backdoor, this random number has the same worth like a rand call. The backdoor is not like in subseven, more like in DES. If that helps you. Speaking of encryption and related algorithms, does anyone know of a well-reviewed library implementing symmetric ciphers and chaining modes?
There seem to be many libraries e. Even the elderly are using Ubuntu Linux, get with the program! And there are stories of USA spying on foreign technology companies and passing on the information to local ones. As usual I im having great issues with finding out exactly how to replace the PRNG Random number generator for some of the very reasons highlighted in this blog…. Im trying to replace the windows RNG with a custom one…my idea is to create a. Intel was supposed to include a true RNG device in their chipset almost 10 years ago.
It was going serial shift quantum noise from a forward biased diode as the above poster talked about. Subscribe to comments on this entry.
Remember personal info? How do you switch it on and off? How do you know what state it is in of or off?? Microsoft lowering costs! Yeah right. Everybody else? Or am I missing something???? Your correction adds ambiguity.
Bruce, do you do FOIA requests? Or, do you talk to people who do? THINK about it! It has been known for a long time that malloc is a security problem. Either that or they are claiming ignorance for sinister benefits.
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