From: "Philip L. Karlton" <karlton@netscape.com>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 09:34:24 +0800
To: paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
Subject: Re: Mousepad RNG's?
In-Reply-To: <844013772.1731.0@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
Message-ID: <325182C3.7184@netscape.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk wrote:
 
> I don`t know what PRNG netscape used in the broken
> version, can anyone tell me what they used, and whether it was the
> PRNG or the seed that was weak

The problem was with the seed; it was especially vulnerable to attacks
from somebody running on the same machine. Sufficient entropy is now
obtained during initialization and the PRNG is reseeded reasonably often
during execution. For the Navigator, this is every time the user event
loop cycles.

> also I would be interested to know
> what they are using now in terms of the algorithm and seed...

A pointer to the fixed code was posted to cypherpunks last year.

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

    Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
	-- Albert Einstein