Re: Can NSA crack PGP?

[Matt Blaze <mab@crypto.com>]

In cypherpunks Phil Karn writes:

>3. Attacking the random number generators. This is often the weakest
>part of many conventional cryptosystems, but the techniques now used
>in PGP are thought to be pretty good. Lest people think that timing
>keystrokes is a poor way to generate random numbers, I should say that
>I once watched somebody key a STU-III (NSA-designed secure phone). At
>one point the phone prompted him to hit the "*" key 20 times. It
>didn't say why, of course, but it was pretty obvious to me.  And if
>it's good enough for NSA...

Minor nit: I agree that keystroke timing is good in principle for getting
"true" random bits, but we should be careful not to extrapolate too much from
the STU-III for general purpose computer systems.  The STU may have a
specially designed keypad timer, while god knows how often some random OS/
hardware combination delivers keyboard interupt times back to user processes.
Compounding the issue is knowing which bits in the interarrival time are
the "hotest" ones to measure on a particular system, which may be surprisingly
far from the lowest order bits depending on the clock granularity and skew.

Obviously the technique works well in some configurations, but there may
be others where it fails badly.  PGP seems to use it too good advantage, but
I'd still be suspicious before trusting it on an untested platform.

-matt