This site is the archived OWASP Foundation Wiki and is no longer accepting Account Requests.
To view the new OWASP Foundation website, please visit https://owasp.org

Difference between revisions of "Insufficient Entropy"

From OWASP
Jump to: navigation, search
(Description)
Line 8: Line 8:
 
==Description==
 
==Description==
  
When an undesirably low amount of [[entropy]] is available. Psuedo Random Number Generators are susceptible to suffering from insufficient entropy when they are initialized because entropy data may not be available to them yet.
+
When an undesirably low amount of entropy is available. Psuedo Random Number Generators are susceptible to suffering from insufficient entropy when they are initialized, because entropy data may not be available to them yet.
 
 
  
 
==Risk Factors==
 
==Risk Factors==

Revision as of 11:27, 26 February 2009

This article is a stub. You can help OWASP by expanding it or discussing it on its Talk page.


This is a Vulnerability. To view all vulnerabilities, please see the Vulnerability Category page.


Last revision (mm/dd/yy): 02/26/2009

Vulnerabilities Table of Contents

Description

When an undesirably low amount of entropy is available. Psuedo Random Number Generators are susceptible to suffering from insufficient entropy when they are initialized, because entropy data may not be available to them yet.

Risk Factors

TBD

Examples

TBD

Related Attacks

  • In many cases a PRNG uses a combination of the system clock and entropy to create seed data. In the case where insufficient entropy is available, an attacker can reduce the size magnitude of the seed value considerably. Furthermore, by guessing values of the system clock, they can create a manageable set of possible PRNG outputs.


Related Vulnerabilities


Related Controls

  • Many PRNG's (/dev/random and /dev/urandom for example) store their last value before shutdown. By using this value at intialization, they can sometimes avoid insufficient or predictable starting entropy.

Related Technical Impacts


References

TBDCategory:Cryptography Category:Cryptographic Vulnerability