From: paul@poboy.b17c.ingr.com (Paul Robichaux)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 95 05:50:38 PDT
To: jsw@neon.netscape.com (Jeff Weinstein)
Subject: Re: netscape's response
In-Reply-To: <43oa83$nhm@tera.mcom.com>
Message-ID: <199509201245.AA11962@poboy.b17c.ingr.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Jeff--

First of all, let me commend you for your honesty and forthrightness
in owning up to the problem. I applaud it both as a cypherpunk and as
one of the guys at Intergraph who pushed really hard to get an OEM
agreement with NCC.

>   If the Navigator is running on a Mac or PC, then the two seeds are
> the current time and the "tick count", which is milliseconds since starting
> windows for the PC version, and some time unit since booting on the Mac.

The Mac tick unit is 1/60th of a second, and TickCount() returns the
number of ticks since the system was booted. I think you could safely
narrow the range down to between 0 and (3600 * 24 * 60 =) 5,184,000,
or about 24 bits. That's better than on the Unix boxes, but not
insurmountable.

>   This was a bad mistake on our part, and we are working hard to fix it.
> We have been trying to identify sources of random bits on PCs, Macs, and
> all of the many unix platforms we support.  We are looking at stuff that
> is system dependent, user dependent, hardware dependent, random external
> sources such as the network and the user.  If anyone has specific
> suggestions I would love to hear them so that we can do a better job.

I wouldn't consider the network to be suitably random. How many of
your users are using Netscape over high-latency, low-speed 14.4
PPP/SLIP links? A lot, I'd bet. Not much good-quality randomness
there.

> > "Netscape has also begun to engage an external group of world-class
> > security experts who will review our solution to this problem before
> > it is sent to customers."
> > 
> > 	A group which offered to review the first version, but
> > Netscape refused.

>   Do you mean that cypherpunks offered to review the netscape code
> if only we made all the source available on the net?  I think that it
> is unrealistic to expect us to release all of our source code to the
> net.  

Unrealistic to expect, yes. Unreasonable to ask? Maybe not.

>   I realize that some cypherpunks think that we should make all of
> our code publicly available.  In an ideal world that would be great,
> but we live in a world with politicians, crooks, lawyers, stockholders,
> etc...  Don't expect to see us posting our entire security
> library source code to cypherpunks.

That's probably not the most likely thing-- but why not allow people
with some security & crypto background _from this list_ see the code,
under NDA, for review? Jim Gillogly, Hal Finney, and several others
have show a past talent for that sort of thing.

Frankly, a signed message from, say, Hal saying "I've looked over the
code and it looks pretty good" would carry a lot of water with me. In
turn, I could communicate my warm fuzzy feeling to the dozen or so
people that asked me about the security flaw yesterday, including our
network ops guy.

Cheers,
- -Paul

- -- 
Paul Robichaux, KD4JZG       | "Things are much simpler and less stressful
perobich@ingr.com            |  when you don't look to the law to fix things."
Not speaking for Intergraph  |      - Tim May (tcmay@got.net) on cypherpunks
		 Be a cryptography user. Ask me how.


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