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Testing

Testing

Posted May 21, 2008 13:13 UTC (Wed) by bvdm (guest, #42755)
In reply to: Testing by bangert
Parent article: Open Source Security Report

The NIST document describes the range of available statistical tests for PRNG's well enough,
but that's not what I am suggesting.

The OpenSSL bug was made possible because OpenSSL has its own layer of entropy processing on
top of sources such as /dev/random on Linux. This is because OpenSSL needs to support
platforms where /dev/random is not available. So even in the presence of a the high quality
entropy source /dev/random on Debian, a bug in OpenSSL negated that entropy. So I am arguing
that OpenSSL needs to have a test suite on top of their entropy stack to detect future bugs.


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