From: karlton@netscape.com (Phil Karlton)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 95 13:15:25 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: "random" number seeds vs. Netscape
Message-ID: <43psn2$6ug@tera.mcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Let me start off by saying that I speak for me and not Netscape. I
also tend to be UNIX centric since I know very little (nothing?) about
the internals of PCs and Macs.

I want to address the bug Netscape has with its currently released
product with respect to seed generation. For the most part this is not
a crypto issue, but rather a system issue.  Those bits of entropy can
only be gathered in a system dependent manner.

Assumption:

    We are relying on the MD5 hash algorithm to gather the string of
    potentially unpredictable sequences. I am assuming that feeding
    known bits along with the unknown will not compromise the
    "randomness" of the MD5 state.

    The basic idea is to feed a sequence of information into the MD5
    hash, expecting that some of the bits for each sub-sequence would
    be only be guessable. If we get enough unguessable bits into the mix,
    then the weak link in the chain would not be the seed generation.

Here is what the client will soon be doing:

    Netscape is available on Macs, Win-16 and Win-32 versions and
    8 different UNIX platforms. The exact details for each platform are
    quite system specific. The basic idea is to feed a sequence
    of information into the MD5 hash, expecting that some of the
    bits for each sub-sequence would be unguessable.

  At program start

    On all platforms:

	Start with the contents of the highest resolution clock we can
	find on the system. [For instance, an R4000 MIPS processor has
	a free-running instruction counter. At 100 Mhz this gets
	incremented every 10 nano-seconds. There are probably a good
	20 bits of unguessable value there.] On Macs and Win* systems
	there are "tick" counters that update 60 (or maybe only 16)
	times a second. We then push through the time of day, beacause
	on some sytems, the microsecond part of a time_val has some
	bits that are only guessable.

    For UNIX we feed the following into the MD5 hash:

	ps (-el or aux depending upon system)

	netstat -ni & netstat -na

	the user's environment. (We will certainly use this as well in
	the 2.0 release. The truly paranoid will be able to run
	whatever seed generator they want and stick the result into
	their environment. How you protect your environment from
	attack is up to you. ;-)

	System specific info such as hardware serial number or
	system id. If you have specific suggestions for any
	particular OS/hardware pair, please let me know.

    For PCs

	Cursor position

	Global memory status

	FreeSpace

	Drive configuration

	Number of running tasks

	Environment strings

	UUIDCreate if there is an ethernet card

	Clipboard owner and contents

	Current process, processID and window

	Free clusters on the disk

    For MACs:

	Machine location (longitude and latitude)

	User name

	Mouse location

	keyboard time threshhold

	last key pressed

	audio volume

	current directory

	current process

	process information for every task  on the system

	stack limits

	zones

	scrap sizes and counts

	event queue

    And then on all platforms

	The stat (file access, creation, modify times, size, inode
	equivalent) and contents of a number of "interesting" files.
	[Where is the PGP random number state file stored?]

	A portion of the contents of the screen.

	And finally, the contents of the highest resolution clock we
	can find.

  Each time the client goes idle

    Reinitialize the seed with the most recent user event (probably
    a button or key down) along with the mouse position, and and
    relatively high resolution clocks.

Known weaknesses:

    If your X display is not the local machine then the X protocol can
    be watched. Given that, the data for the reseeding of the MD5 hash
    will be compromised. [Any scheme that relies on random user input
    to generate a seed suffers from the same problem.]  This is not
    quite as bad as it might be. The exact time of the client becoming
    idle can only be guessed. We should be able to get a few
    unguessable bits from the microsecond part of the time-of-day
    clock each time. Enough cycles of user actions should help to make
    the hash less subject to a brute force attack.

    In fact, the entire X protocol issue is one that could take up
    another 3 pages. An SSLized version of the server would help,
    but how would anybody export it? You "xhost +" fans are doomed.

    If the user launches the client to a secure home page then there
    will be no user actions involved before the first need for a seed.

Thoughts on guessing:

    If Eve has root access to the user's workstation, all bets are off.
    Replacement of one of the system libraries or patching the client
    executable are among the attacks that would make it trivial to
    breach any part of the security. Specific measures (like computing
    a hash over the text of the program) could help against some of
    these attacks, but it is not realisitic to believe that we can
    prevent the attack from a sophisticated person with root access.

    Multi-user Unix machines present a special problem. There are those
    at Netscape that argue that anybody who has login access to your
    machine may as well be considered to have root access. There are
    enough known attacks that this is true to a large extent.  However,
    I think we can do better than just giving up. Unfortunately most of
    the sources of entropy available to the client are also available
    to the attacker. For instance, the output of "ps" is not much help
    against this form of attacker. As Jeff Weinstein said earlier and I
    echo here: specific suggestions are more than welcome.

    When Eve has access to the wire for all of the packets into and out
    of the user's workstation, then some of the networking information
    can be guessed. See above about known weaknesses if Eve has access
    to the X protocol stream.

    I am most comfortable about the "randomness" of the generated seed
    if Eve is outside a fire wall sniffing packets. The difficulty in
    guessing what processes/tasks are running on the target machine is
    quite a bit of help here.

What I would like:

    Any OS has access to a number of real-world physical sources of
    randomness. This information is not made available to a user level
    process. How long did that last seek take? Was there any noise on
    the microphone? It would be good if the OS could gather that
    information and make some set of bits available to any process that
    asks. Having this be part of all OSes would make my job easier.

    More specifically: A "getnoise()" system call in UNIX could be
    better than anything I can do and easier. Can we convince the UNIX
    vendors to start providing that?

    My life would have been simpler if this attack had been done after
    the 2.0 version of the client had been released. :-) Believe it or
    not, we were beginning to beef up the seed generation a couple of
    weeks ago. The time spent on patching the current release will not
    all go to waste, but it has cut down on my limited opportunities to
    sleep.

For those that curious: being responsible for helping to fix a bug that
is getting front page coverage in major newspapers is not nearly as
much fun as it sounds.

PK
--
Philip L. Karlton			karlton@netscape.com
Principal Curmudgeon			http://www.netscape.com/people/karlton
Netscape Communications Corporation