Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm just tired & not able to detect sarcasm right now, but isn't 2^80 bytes more bytes than are currently stored in the world? That's on the order of 10^24, which is something like 1 million exabytes, which is a million squared terabytes, right?

The amount of digitally stored information in the world as of May 2009 [1] is in the order of 2^71. There's no way a single process in a Linux distro will live long enough to read 2^80 bytes for the foreseeable future.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/may/18/digital-cont...

No, it's called being safe

And I wouldn't put it past them to have an attack (at least theorectical) that exploits this

There's safe and there's FUD. Nobody will read 2^80 bytes from urandom. You'll literally run out of time before that. It would take around 1,782,051,134 years to do on my system.

So if they write that there's a vulnerability after reading 2^80 bytes - that's great! We're secure. If they write that you must ensure to do something after 2^80 bytes - that's complete bullshit.

Yes, reading 2^80 bytes for a practical attac is impossible today (and also for the near future)

However, remember when attacks to 3DES, MD5 were only theoretical?

Also, you may not even need to read 2^80 bytes, there might be a (future) vulnerability that allows you to shortcut this.

There are physical limits to our reality and it's very unlikely those limits can be broken (eg, speed of light). Given those limits, 2^80 is large enough that the limit cannot be surpassed without fully breaking reality (eg, timetravel).

If you can break reality, all bets are off though and trying to defend against attacks that break reality in the future are impossible.

The difference is that weaknesses were found in 3DES and MD5. Increasing computing power was not the main factor. "Only" being able to produce 2^80 random bytes is a known and expected limitation. Sure, the CSPRNG could in theory be found to have a weakness, but that has nothing to do with the 2^80 bytes and the same could be said for virtually any cryptographic algorithm.

What weaknesses in 3DES are you thinking about that yield practical attacks?

I am not arguing that there are; that was the parent comment. However, while the 3DES weaknesses don't yield practical attacks now, they still reduce the effective key length. My point was not that 3DES is different in that it is exploitable, but that it is different from the 2^80 limit in that the CSPRNG in that the later is not a result of a mistake in the algorithm's design but instead an expected feature. Just like the fact that any fixed-size key symmetric cipher is "limited" by that key size.

Now, if someone found a lower limit based on exploiting some weakness in the random number generation, the analogy with 3DES and MD5 would make more sense.

Which practical attacks on 3DES are you thinking of?

Just brute force basically

But there seems to be smarter attacks (ref 21) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES#Security

Those are not practical attacks. But your argument hinges on their being non-theoretical attacks on 3DES. Are there others you were thinking of?

3DES might have been a bad example.

My point is that even if today some sizes and lengths seem only of theoretical concern, tomorrow there might be a vulnerability, a new approach to the problem, or even natural technological evolution that might turn it into a practical attack (even when it seems impossible today)

But that's true of every cryptographic primitive. You can't make reasoned decisions based on that logic.

From what I recall, the consensus is that the smarter attack is less efficient than brute force overall.

> in which case application developers may prefer to implement a DRBG using /dev/random as a conditioned seed.

Wait, what? dev/urandom is a DRBG seeded the same way dev/random is. This doesn't seem to make sense.

Nods

You're very unlikely to be continually reseeding your own DBRG with new entropy, so it will be less secure than /dev/urandom, which is.

Suspiciously bad advice, there, from what I can see.

Just as a random counter-example, Openssl does use that method. But it actually seeds from urandom, rather than random... And fails when forking/threading by default. :(

But yes, that's not common. (more info: http://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Random_Numbers)

Is the joke that this is awful advice?

(Except for saving the entropy pool between reboots, which can be useful, afaik.)

> application developers may prefer to implement a DRBG using /dev/random as a conditioned seed

No. Doing random in userland is just wrong. If your program has access to /dev/urandom, use it. If not, use arc4random().

> “Random Number Generators: Introduction for Operating System Developers”

Or look how OpenBSD does it. (getentropy(), arc4random(), the subsystem)

> The entropy pool used by /dev/urandom must be saved between reboots.

OpenBSD does this, and more. The bootloader basically seeds the kernel with old entropy from before the reboot.

> - The entropy pool used by /dev/urandom must be saved between reboots.

Every single Linux distro does this.