33C3: How Can You Trust Your Random Numbers?

February 1, 2017 by Elliot Williams 49 Comments

One of the standout talks at the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress concerned pseudo-random-number generators (PRNGs). [Vladimir Klebanov] (right) and [Felix Dörre] (left) provided a framework for making sure that PRNGs are doing what they should. Along the way, they discovered a flaw in Libgcrypt/GNUPG, which they got fixed. Woot.

Cryptographically secure random numbers actually matter, a lot. If you’re old enough to remember the Debian OpenSSL debacle of 2008, essentially every Internet service was backdoorable due to bad random numbers. So they matter. [Vladimir] makes the case that writing good random number generators is very, very hard. Consequently, it’s very important that their output be tested very, very well.

So how can we test them? [Vladimir] warns against our first instinct, running a statistical test suite like DIEHARD. He points out (correctly) that running any algorithm through a good enough hash function will pass statistical tests, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for cryptography.
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Improved Hourglass Entropy

January 25, 2013 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

improved-hour-glass-entropy

[Wardy] built himself a high quality entropy source with parts he had lying around. It’s based on the hourglass entropy project we saw in a links post earlier this month. Just like that project, he is bouncing a laser off of the falling sand and reading the result. But he brings a few innovations to the party, and has test results to back up his work.

The first change is an obvious one; motorize the hourglass so that you don’t need to flip it by hand. We thought this might mess with the laser alignment but the clip after the break proved us wrong. He changed up the sensor, using an LED connected to the base of an NPN transistor. The next change was to mount the light sensor at an angle to the laser rather than straight on. This picks up reflections of the laser and not the direct beam itself, resulting in a wider range of readings.

He used an Ethernet shield to get the system on the network. It’s pushing 420k random numbers per second and was tested with the DieHarder suite. It didn’t get a very high score, but it did pass the test.

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