Randomness Recommendations for Security Security systems today are built on increasingly strong cryptographic algorithms that foil pattern analysis attempts.

Introduction Software cryptography is coming into wider use. Systems like Kerberos, PEM, PGP, etc. are maturing and becoming a part of the network landscape [PEM]. These systems provide substantial protection against snooping and spoofing. However, there is a potential flaw. At the heart of all cryptographic systems is the generation of secret, unguessable (i.e., random) numbers. For the present, the lack of generally available facilities for generating such unpredictable numbers is an open wound …

…of hardware sources of randomness, a variety of user and software sources can frequently be used instead with care; however, most modern systems already have hardware, such as disk drives or audio input, that could be used to produce high quality randomness. Once a sufficient quantity of high quality seed key material (a few hundred bits) is available, strong computational techniques are available to produce cryptographically strong sequences of unpredicatable quantities from this seed material.