Chapter 9
Generating Randomness

To generate key material, we need a random number generator, or RNG. Generating good randomness is a vital part of many cryptographic operations. Generating good randomness is also very challenging.

We won't go into a detailed discussion of what randomness really is; an informal discussion suffices for our purposes. A good informal definition is that random data is unpredictable to the attacker, even if he is taking active steps to defeat our randomness.

Good random number generators are necessary for many cryptographic functions. Part II discussed the secure channel and its components. We assumed there to be a key known to both Alice and Bob. That key has to be generated somewhere. Key management systems use random number generators to choose keys. If you get the RNG wrong, you end up with a weak key. This is exactly what happened to one of the early versions of the Netscape browser [54].

The measure for randomness is called entropy [118]. Here&apos...