Peter Gutmann's paper on the subject:
http://www.cryptoapps.com/~peter/06_random.pdf The Yarrow design document:
http://www.counterpane.com/yarrow.htmlOther links & suggestions:
A link farm from David Wagner:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/rnd/index.html The FIPS 186 generator:
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips186-2/fips186-2-change1.pdf
(appendix 3)Allow me to clarify my problem a little. I'm commonly engaged to review source code for a security audit, some such programs include a random number generator, many of which are of ad-hoc design. The nature of such audits is that it's much more appealing to be able to say "here are three accepted guidelines that your generator violates" rather than "I haven't seen that before and I don't like it, you should replace it with something else".
So I'm interested in such design guidelines, if they're available, which such a generator could be tested against. While the resources provided have been useful, it's only led me to where I was: that the only way to do so is to attempt to analyze the system for vulnerability to a collection of known flaws.
I know a bunch of basic, obvious things that I can state (have a large enough internal state, generate output with a secure hash, etc.) and a bunch of other fuzzier notions that are harder to concretize (output should be dependent on a sufficient quantity of the internal pool, reseeding should affect a sufficent quantity of the internal pool, etc.). But I don't have a resource which attempts to canonically define minimal requirements for all these elements. (If I have missed such a list in skimming the broad resources available, I'd appreciate a note.)
Anyway, thanks to all.
- Tim
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