The PseudoRandom Number Generator (PRNG) used by the Windows operating system is the most commonly used PRNG. The pseudorandomness of the output of this generator is crucial for the security of almost any application running in Windows. Nevertheless, its exact algorithm was never published. We examined the binary code of a distribution of Windows 2000. This investigation was done without any help from Microsoft. We reconstructed the algorithm used by the pseudorandom number generator (namely, the function CryptGenRandom). We analyzed the security of the algorithm and found a nontrivial attack: Given the internal state of the generator, the previous state can be computed in 2 23 steps. This attack on forward security demonstrates that the design of the generator is flawed, since it is well known how to prevent such attacks. After our analysis was published, Microsoft acknowledged that Windows XP is vulnerable to the same attack. We also analyzed the way in which the generator is used by the operating system and found that it amplifies the effect of the attack: The generator is run in user mode rather than in kernel mode; therefore, it is easy to access its state even without administrator privileges. The initial values of part of the state of the generator are not set explicitly, but rather are defined by whatever values are present on the stack when the generator is called. Furthermore, each process runs a different copy of the generator, and the state of the generator is refreshed with system-generated entropy only after generating 128KB of output for the process running it. The result of combining this observation with our attack is that learning a single state may reveal 128KB of the past and future output of the generator. The implication of these findings is that a buffer overflow attack or a similar attack can be used to learn a single state of the generator, which can then be used to predict all random values, such as SSL keys, used by a process in all its past and future operations. This attack is more severe and more efficient than known attacks in which an attacker can only learn SSL keys if it is controlling the attacked machine at the time the keys are used.

The pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) used by the Windows operating system is the most commonly used PRNG. The pseudo-randomness of the output of this generator is crucial for the security of almost any application running in Windows. Nevertheless, its exact algorithm was never published. We examined the binary code of a distribution of Windows 2000, which is still the second most popular operating system after Windows XP. (This investigation was done without any help from Microsoft.) We reconstructed, for the first time, the algorithm used by the pseudo-random number generator (namely, the function CryptGenRandom). We analyzed the security of the algorithm and found a non-trivial attack: given the internal state of the generator, the previous

Linux is the most popular open source project. The Linux random number generator is part of the kernel of all Linux distributions and is based on generating randomness from entropy of operating system events. The output of this generator is used for almost every security protocol, including TLS/SSL key generation, choosing TCP sequence numbers, and file system and email encryption. Although the generator is part of an open source project, its source code (about 2500 lines of code) is poorly documented, and patched with hundreds of code patches. We used dynamic and static reverse engineering to learn the operation of this generator. This paper presents a description of the underlying algorithms and exposes several security vulnerabilities. In particular, we show an attack on the forward security of the generator which enables an adversary who exposes the state of the generator to compute previous states and outputs. In addition we present a few cryptographic flaws in the design of the generator, as well as measurements of the actual entropy collected by it, and a critical analysis of the use of the generator in Linux distributions on diskless devices.