IACR News item: 09 May 2012
Patrick Lacharme, Andrea Röck, Vincent Strubel, Marion Videau
ePrint Reportinputs which is widely used in many security related applications and
protocols. This PRNG is written as an open source code which is
subject to regular changes. It was last analyzed in the work of
Gutterman et al. in 2006 [GPR06] but since then no new
analysis has been made available, while in the meantime several changes have been applied to the code,
among others, to counter the attacks presented
[GPR06]. Our work describes the Linux PRNG of kernel
versions 2.6.30.7 and upwards. We detail the PRNG architecture
in the Linux system and provide its first accurate mathematical
description and a precise analysis of the building blocks, including entropy estimation and extraction. Subsequently, we give a security analysis including the feasibility of cryptographic attacks and an empirical test of the entropy estimator..
Finally, we underline some important changes to the previous
versions and their consequences.
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