True RNG and GnuPG / libgcrypt

[Werner Koch]

On Thu,  3 Oct 2013 13:55, ekleog at gmail.com said:

> So I believe implementing a fortuna "generator" in GnuPG is not the most urgent
> improvement to be made -- though I know nothing of GnuPG's current most-wanted
> improvements.

GnuPG and Libgcrypt use an RNG architecture described many years ago by
Peter Gutmann and also used in his very good Cryptlib.  Actually Peter
and his co-hackers have been so kind to re-license their code so that we
could make use of the Windows and bare Unix entropy gatherers.

   This random number generator is modelled after the one described in
   Peter Gutmann's 1998 Usenix Security Symposium paper: "Software
   Generation of Practically Strong Random Numbers".  See also chapter
   6 in his book "Cryptographic Security Architecture", New York,
   2004, ISBN 0-387-95387-6.

   Note that the acronym CSPRNG stands for "Continuously Seeded
   PseudoRandom Number Generator" as used in Peter's implementation of
   the paper and not only for "Cryptographically Secure PseudoRandom
   Number Generator".

Yarrow and Fortuna are different and simpler designs than this highly
conservative CSPRNG.



Salam-Shalom,

   Werner

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