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ACSAC
2003
IEEE

Practical Random Number Generation in Software

14 years 5 months ago
Practical Random Number Generation in Software
There is a large gap between the theory and practice for random number generation. For example, on most operating systems, using /dev/random to generate a 256-bit AES key is highly likely to produce a key with no more than 160 bits of security. In this paper, we propose solutions to many of the issues that real software-based random number infrastructures have encountered. Particularly, we demonstrate that universal hash functions are a theoretically appealing and efficient mechanism for accumulating entropy, we show how to deal with forking processes without using a two-phase commit, we explore better metrics for estimating entropy and argue that systems should provide both computational security and information theoretic security through separate interfaces.
John Viega
Added 04 Jul 2010
Updated 04 Jul 2010
Type Conference
Year 2003
Where ACSAC
Authors John Viega
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