# Tag Info

4

The 2012 paper: Mining Your Ps and Qs: Detection of Widespread Weak Keys in Network Devices. In this case the RNG itself was ok, but poor (ie predictable) entropy was used to seed it. The abstract opens: RSA and DSA can fail catastrophically when used with malfunctioning random number generators. So that seems to fit your question. The authors did a ...

7

Suppose that you generate a brand new RSA key pair, that you will use, say, to authenticate yourself when connecting to a SSH server. This will be done through some library that implements RSA key pair generation (say, OpenSSL). That library will produce the key elements by generating random integers of the right length until such integers appear to be prime ...

4

Stephen correctly points out that the paper isn't about RNGs. I'll take the question literally, though, and remark that there are non-cryptographic applications that could potentially benefit from faster CSPRNG. Non-cryptographic users of PRNGs have to balance two concerns: Speed Biases Faster generators tend to have more statistical biases, while less ...

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This paper isn't about a faster RNG, and it's mostly only of interest in a computer science context rather than in an applied cryptographic context. These results reduce the theoretical requirements needed from two weak sources of randomness in order to combine them into a source of true randomness. However, in the applied world, we already have "enough" — a ...

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I'm assuming that RNGCryptoServiceProvider is an interface to a properly implemented CSPRNG. If so, its output should be impossible to predict (for an adversary with any practical amount of computing power, and no access to the internal RNG state) and uniformly distributed (i.e. every $n$-bit output is generated with the same probability of $1/2^n$). Thus, ...

2

/dev/urandom is only computationally secure, so you won't get information-theoretical security for your OTP if you draw it from /dev/urandom. If you're happy with computational security, you might as well use a stream cipher instead of a OTP. Stream ciphers are much easier to use securely than OTPs. On Linux /dev/random aims for information-theoretical ...

4

The definitions are not all universal and there is quite some overlap. The clearest definition is for PRG, which is the (synchronous) stream cipher model. A PRG maps a secret value to a long, random-looking keystream, so that an attacker cannot predict any part of the keystream from knowing other parts of it. For a precise definition, you can see the ...

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