Conference Proceedings

Practical state recovery attacks against legacy RNG implementations

Shaanan N Cohney, Matthew D Green, Nadia Heninger

PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2018 ACM SIGSAC CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER AND COMMUNICATIONS SECURITY (CCS'18) | ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY | Published : 2018

Abstract

The ANSI X9.17/X9.31 pseudorandom number generator design was first standardized in 1985, with variants incorporated into numerous cryptographic standards over the next three decades. The design uses timestamps together with a statically keyed block cipher to produce pseudo-random output. It has been known since 1998 that the key must remain secret in order for the output to be secure. However, neither the FIPS 140-2 standardization process nor NIST’s later descriptions of the algorithm specified any process for key generation. We performed a systematic study of publicly available FIPS 140-2 certifications for hundreds of products that implemented the ANSI X9.31 random number generator, and ..

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Grants

Awarded by National Science Foundation


Awarded by Office of Naval Research


Funding Acknowledgements

We thank David McGrew and Dario Ciccarone for helpful discussions and research into Cisco's product lines, and Steve Checkoway for reverse-engineering the Juniper ScreenOS implementation of the X9.31 PRG. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grants CNS-1651344, CNS-1505799, CNS-1408734, CNS-1010928, CNS-1228443, and EFMA-1441209; The Office of Naval Research under contract N00014-14-1-0333; the Mozilla Foundation; and a gift from Cisco. We are grateful to Cisco for donating the Cisco UCS servers we used for the computational experiments.