ELEC5616_Computer And Network Security_2014 Semester 1_CNS_Lecture_4.pdfVIP

ELEC5616 COMPUTER NETWORK SECURITY Lecture 4: Cyphers II PSEUDORANDOM NUMBER GENERATORS Sources of random numbers are desirable in many occasions: Session Keys, Deck Shuffling, Challenges, Nonces, ... Unfortunately, truly random sources are not easy to come by... Thermal noise of electrical circuits, timing of Geiger counter clicks Really hard to come by... U.S. Patent 5,732,138: “Method for seeding a pseudo-random number generator with a cryptographic hash of a digitization of a chaotic system.” (called Lavarand by Silicon Graphics: take a guess what it is) Instead, most applications need to make do with a pseudorandom number generator PRNG) PSEUDORANDOM NUMBER GENERATORS Desirable properties of PRNGs include: • Repeatability • Statistical randomness • Long period / cycle • Insensitive to seeds PRNGs are often broken by: • Statistical tests that find patterns or biases in the output sequence • Inferring the state of the internal registers from the output sequence PRNGs are usually critically important parts of the system, and often a single point of failure LINEAR CONGRUENTIAL GENERATORS xn+1 = (axn + b) mod c Unix rand() function a, , c are constants Period of generators is less than c Cannot be used for security – easily predictable Only need two consecutive values to reconstruct the internal state Used by an Internet casino who were so sure of their code, they published their algorithms! With expected results... Moral of the story: don’t use it LINEAR FEEDBACK SHIFT REGISTERS (LFSR) Seed is the initial value of the shift register Feedback network based on polynomials over finite fields Easy and fast in hardware (1 bit per clock) n bit shift register Core Problem: Tap configuration can be determined from 2n output bits THE RC4 STREAM CYPH