<story><title>Academics Make Theoretical Breakthrough in Random Number Generation</title><url>https://threatpost.com/academics-make-theoretical-breakthrough-in-random-number-generation/118150/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m sure this is as important to computer science as the article claims, but not having even read the paper I can say pretty confidently that it isn&amp;#x27;t going to have much of an impact on computer security. Even if it became far easier to generate true random numbers, it wouldn&amp;#x27;t change (a) how we generate randomness at a systems level or (b) what goes wrong with randomness.&lt;p&gt;Our problem with cryptography is &lt;i&gt;not the quality of random numbers&lt;/i&gt;. We are fine at generating unpredictable, decorrelated bits for keys, nonces, and IVs. Soundly designed systems aren&amp;#x27;t attacked through the quality of their entropy inputs†.&lt;p&gt;The problem we have with randomness and entropy is logistical. So long as our CSPRNGs need initial, secret entropy sources of any kind, there will be a distinction between the insecure state of the system before it is initialized and the (permanent) secure state of the system after it&amp;#x27;s been initialized. And so long as we continue building software on general purpose operating systems, there will be events (forking, unsuspending, unpickling, resuming VMs, cloning VMs) that violate our assumptions about which state we&amp;#x27;re in.&lt;p&gt;Secure randomness isn&amp;#x27;t a computational or cryptographic problem (or at least, the cryptographic part of the problem has long been thoroughly solved). It&amp;#x27;s a systems programming problem. It&amp;#x27;s back in the un-fun realm of &amp;quot;all software has bugs and all bugs are potential security problems&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s for that reason that the big problem in cryptography right now isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;generate better random&amp;quot;, but instead &amp;quot;factor out as much as possible our dependence on randomness&amp;quot;. Deterministic DSA and EdDSA are examples of this trend, as are SIV and Nonce-Misuse Resistant AEADs.&lt;p&gt;† &lt;i&gt;(unsound systems frequently are, but that just makes my point for me)&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Academics Make Theoretical Breakthrough in Random Number Generation</title><url>https://threatpost.com/academics-make-theoretical-breakthrough-in-random-number-generation/118150/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>hannob</author><text>While this may be an interesting theoretical result it almost certainly has zero practical implications for cryptography.&lt;p&gt;We already know how to build secure random number generators. Pretty much every real world problem with random numbers can be traced back to people not using secure random numbers (or not using random numbers at all due to bugs) or using random number generators before they were properly initialized (early boot time entropy problems).&lt;p&gt;This random number thing is so clouded in mystery and a lot of stuff gets proposed that solves nothing (like quantum RNGs) and stuff that&amp;#x27;s more folklore than anything else (depleting entropy and the whole &amp;#x2F;dev&amp;#x2F;random story). In the end it&amp;#x27;s quite simple: You can build a secure RNG out of any secure hash or symmetric cipher. Once you seeded it with a couple of random bytes it&amp;#x27;s secure forever.</text></comment>