I'm confused about two statements here: At 2:10 PM +0100 5/13/08, Ben Laurie wrote:
The result of this is that for the last two years (from Debian's "Edgy" release until now), anyone doing pretty much any crypto on Debian (and hence Ubuntu) has been using easily guessable keys. This includes SSH keys, SSL keys and OpenVPN keys.
. . .
[2] Valgrind tracks the use of uninitialised memory. Usually it is bad to have any kind of dependency on uninitialised memory, but OpenSSL happens to include a rare case when its OK, or even a good idea: its randomness pool. Adding uninitialised memory to it can do no harm and might do some good, which is why we do it. It does cause irritating errors from some kinds of debugging tools, though, including valgrind and Purify. For that reason, we do have a flag (PURIFY) that removes the offending code. However, the Debian maintainers, instead of tracking down the source of the uninitialised memory instead chose to remove any possibility of adding memory to the pool at all. Clearly they had not understood the bug before fixing it.
The second bit makes it sound like the stuff that the Debian folks blindly removed was one, possibly-useful addition to the entropy pool. The first bit makes it sound like the stuff was absolutely critical to the entropy of produced keys. Which one is correct?
--Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]