Some tips about RNGs and their usage

(via Tony Finch)

'How to cheat at Bridge by breaking the tournament card-dealing random number generator', via Tony Finch

Adam Langley on the Juniper VPN-snooping security hole:

... if it wasn't the NSA who did this, we have a case where a US gov­ern­ment back­door ef­fort (Dual-EC) laid the ground­work for some­one else to at­tack US in­ter­ests. Cer­tainly this at­tack would be a lot eas­ier given the pres­ence of a back­door-friendly RNG al­ready in place. And I've not even dis­cussed the SSH back­door. [...]

Worrying stuff from the LBT team. ATM RNGs are predictable, and can be spoofed by intermediate parties:

'So far we have performed more than 1000 transactions at more than 20 ATMs and a number of POS terminals, and are collating a data set for statistical analysis. We have developed a passive transaction logger which can be integrated into the substrate of a real bank card, which records up to 100 unpredictable numbers in its EEPROM. Our analysis is ongoing but so far we have established non-uniformity of unpredictable numbers in half of the ATMs we have looked at.

First, there is an easier attack than predicting the RNG. Since the unpredictable number is generated by the terminal but the relying party is the issuing bank, any intermediate party – from POS terminal software, to payment switches, or a middleman on the phone line – can intercept and superimpose their own choice of UN. Attacks such as those of Nohl and Roth, and MWR Labs show that POS terminals can be remotely hacked simply by inserting a sabotaged smartcard into the terminal.