GNU bug report logs - #22202
24.5; SECURITY ISSUE -- Emacs Server vulnerable to random number generator attack on Windows systems

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From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: Richard Copley <rcopley <at> gmail.com>
Cc: 22202 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, demetriobenour <at> gmail.com, deng <at> randomsample.de
Subject: bug#22202: 24.5; SECURITY ISSUE -- Emacs Server vulnerable to random number generator attack on Windows systems
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2015 22:13:22 +0200

> From: Richard Copley <rcopley <at> gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2015 19:49:42 +0000
> Cc: Demetrios Obenour <demetriobenour <at> gmail.com>, David Engster <deng <at> randomsample.de>, 
> 	22202 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> >> What Demetri has just described is what I would do.
> >
> >Now I'm confused: do what?
> 
> As I understand it: Provide a function callable from lisp that returns
> a cryptographically secure sequence of random bytes, of a specified
> length. Use that function to generate the server secret.

That's what my patch does.

> >We still need to support 'random' with an
> >argument, so we cannot get rid of seeding a PRNG with a known value.
> >And I didn't want to remove srandom.
> 
> Given the above, we could leave "random", etc., as they are, or we
> could use a better PRNG and/or seed with system entropy. It would
> no longer be tied up with this issue report.

Patches welcome, as I said already.

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