Cracking random number generators (xoroshiro128+)

Re:Cracking random number generators (xoroshiro128+) by aidenn0 on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @01:07PM (#15074347)

Many microbenchmarks intended to measure other things become benchmarks of your RNG if you use anything slower than an LCG. This biases a lot of places towards using the poorest RNG they can get away with.

This is made worse by many purchasing decisions made based upon microbenchmarks with the requirements of "default settings" so defaulting to insecure is a sound business decision in more cases than you might think.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cracking random number generators (xoroshiro128+) by sanxiyn on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @03:37PM (#15075670)

This is indeed a tragedy, because it could have been easily avoided by including LCG in microbenchmarks. LCG is less than ten lines, so even for very short microbenchmarks including RNG is very feasible. Alas, I guess such reasonable people don't write microbenchmarks in the first place.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Cracking random number generators (xoroshiro128+) by tptacek on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @04:05PM (#15075902)

I understand the "broken benchmarks" problem and I acknowledge that there are some cases that are so demanding and have such low security sensitivity that it makes sense to have an LCG in the standard library.

But I stand by my argument that the default platform RNG should be a CSPRNG, and that developers should reach for a CSPRNG by default.

Which makes all the attention we've been giving to stuff like xoroshiro128+ and PCG pretty confusing to me. It feels like people arguing very earnestly about non-problems, while ignoring a huge problem in our standard libraries.

[ Parent | on HN ]