Re: NYT on Netscape Crack

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

>   The New York Times, September 19, 1995, pp. A1, D21.
> ......
>   "The good news and the bad news of the Internet is that
>   when you put something up there, many more people can test
>   it," said Mike Homer, the vice president of marketing at
>   Netscape. "You also give yourself the opportunity of having
>   people point things out which you can fix quickly."

That's a good, and realistic, attitude.

>   Netscape officials said today that they would strengthen
>   the system, by making it significantly harder to determine
>   the random number at the heart of their coding system. They
>   said they would no longer disclose what data would be used
>   to generate the random numbers.

I do hope this is just John Markoff's simplification of what Netscape's 
folks said and not an endorsement of security-by-obscurity.
I realize that some data does need to be kept around on disk
or in the program, since obtaining a lot of random bits at the beginning
of every transaction either requires annoying user interactions or
takes too long to get decent quality, and certainly this data
ought to be kept private by the algorithms involved.

One concern I've had about the popular "crunch some bits repeatedly
through MD5" approach to random number generation is that knowing
one sample from the stream (e.g. by doing a transaction with the victim)
gives you the rest of the stream.  There's a way to improve that.

        let X(0) be some number you keep around from a previous
                session, modified by whatever hardware randomness
                is available, and seeded by user input the first time.
        let X(i) = MD5(X(i-1))   
        let Y(i) = hash(X(i)), where hash is something like MD5(key,X(i))
        use Y(i) as the output random number.

This eliminates the ability to determine X(i) or Y(i+1) as a function of Y(i),
since the search space of X(i) is presumably too large to reverse (unlike
the number of bits you can cheaply get in one session).  Keeping some of the
bits of Y(i) around to use in addition to the other key for the hash, or to
key the MD5(X(i-1)) with, may be useful as well.

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# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
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