RANDOM(4)

NAME
random, urandom - random number devices

DESCRIPTION
This device gathers environmental noise from device drivers, etc., and returns good random numbers, suitable for cryptographic use. Besides the obvious cryptographic uses, these numbers are also good for seeding TCP sequence numbers, and other places where it is desirable to have numbers which are not only random, but hard to predict by an attacker.

  Theory of operation
Computers are very predictable devices. Hence it is extremely hard to produce truly random numbers on a computer — as opposed to pseudo-random numbers, which can easily generated by using a algorithm. Unfortunately, it is very easy for attackers to guess the sequence of pseudo-random number generators, and for some applications this is not acceptable. So instead, we must try to gather "environmental noise" from the computer's environment, which must be hard for outside attackers to observe, and use that to generate random numbers. In a Unix environment, this is best done from inside the kernel.

Sources of randomness from the environment include inter-keyboard timings, inter-interrupt timings from some interrupts, and other events which are both (a) non-deterministic and (b) hard for an outside observer to measure. Randomness from these sources are added to an "entropy pool", which is periodically mixed using the MD5 compression function in CBC mode. As random bytes are mixed into the entropy pool, the routines keep an estimate of how many bits of randomness have been stored into the random number generator's internal state.

When random bytes are desired, they are obtained by taking the MD5 hash of a counter plus the contents of the "entropy pool". The reason for the MD5 hash is so that we can avoid exposing the internal state of random number generator. Although the MD5 hash does protect the pool, each random byte which is generated from the pool reveals some information which was derived from the internal state, and thus increases the amount of information an outside attacker has available to try to make some guesses about the random number generator's internal state. For this reason, the routine decreases its internal estimate of how many bits of "true randomness" are contained in the entropy pool as it outputs random numbers.

If this estimate goes to zero, the routine can still generate random numbers; however it may now be possible for an attacker to analyze the output of the random number generator, and the MD5 algorithm, and thus have some success in guessing the output of the routine. Phil Karn (who devised this mechanism of using MD5 plus a counter to extract random numbers from an entropy pool) calls this "practical randomness", since in the worse case this is equivalent to hashing MD5 with a counter and an undisclosed secret. If MD5 is a strong cryptographic hash, this should be fairly resistant to attack.

  Exported interfaces — output
There are three exported interfaces; the first is one designed to be used from within the kernel:

void get_random_bytes(void *buf, int nbytes);

This interface will return the requested number of random bytes, and place it in the requested buffer.

The two other interfaces are two character devices /dev/random and /dev/urandom. /dev/random is suitable for use when very high quality randomness is desired (for example, for key generation.), as it will only return a maximum of the number of bits of randomness (as estimated by the random number generator) contained in the entropy pool.

The /dev/urandom device does not have this limit, and will return as many bytes as are requested. As more and more random bytes are requested without giving time for the entropy pool to recharge, this will result in lower quality random numbers. For many applications, however, this is acceptable.

  Exported interfaces — input
The two current exported interfaces for gathering environmental noise from the devices are:

void add_keyboard_randomness(unsigned char scancode);
void add_interrupt_randomness(int irq);

The first function uses the inter-keypress timing, as well as the scancode as random inputs into the "entropy pool".

The second function uses the inter-interrupt timing as random inputs to the entropy pool. Note that not all interrupts are good sources of randomness! For example, the timer interrupts is not a good choice, because the periodicity of the interrupts is too regular, and hence predictable to an attacker. Disk interrupts are a better measure, since the timing of the disk interrupts are more unpredictable. The routines try to estimate how many bits of randomness a particular interrupt channel offers, by keeping track of the first and second order deltas in the interrupt timings.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The original core code was written by Theodore Ts'o, and was intended for the Linux platform. This was ported to FreeBSD by Mark Murray, who also wrote the rndcontrol utility.

Ideas for constructing this random number generator were derived from the Pretty Good Privacy's random number generator, and from private discussions with Phil Karn. This design has been further modified by myself, so any flaws are solely my responsibility, and should not be attributed to the authors of PGP or to Phil.

The code for MD5 transform was taken from Colin Plumb's implementation, which has been placed in the public domain. The MD5 cryptographic checksum was devised by Ronald Rivest, and is documented in RFC 1321, "The MD5 Message Digest Algorithm".

Further background information on this topic may be obtained from RFC 1750, "Randomness Recommendations for Security", by Donald Eastlake, Steve Crocker, and Jeff Schiller.

SEE ALSO
rndcontrol(8)

FILES
/dev/random
/dev/urandom

HISTORY
The random, urandom files appeared in FreeBSD 2.1.5.