[erlang-questions] Password generator in Erlang

[Zabrane Mickael]

Thanks guys. I'll give "crypto:strong_rand_bytes" a try ;-)

Regards,
Zabrane


On Aug 17, 2012, at 5:00 PM, Jeremey Barrett wrote:

> Hi all... if you want pseudo-random bytes, use crypto:rand_bytes() or crypto:strong_rand_bytes(), depending on your security requirements. rand_bytes() calls OpenSSL's RAND_pseudo_bytes(), and strong_rand_bytes() calls OpenSSL's RAND_bytes(). Read up on them for more info.
> 
> strong_rand_bytes() will return an error if insufficient entropy is present. rand_bytes() will "just do it", which may not be what you want.
> 
> OpenSSL is widely deployed, trusted, etc. The built-in wrappers in Erlang are very convenient, just use them. The crypto community has been over and over this for two decades. I cannot stress enough the value of just using a trusted, open implementation vs. fretting over details that may or may not be relevant. There are so many factors you cannot account for otherwise.
> 
> Regards,
> Jeremey.
> 
> 
> On Aug 17, 2012, at 5:53 AM, Samuel <samuelrivas@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
>>> The second implementation is more secure in that sense, but still the
>>> original seed is guessable. An attacker can generate possible password
>>> sequences by bruteforce just tying possible now tuples around the time
>>> he thinks the real seed was created.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> So, how one can generate a secure un-predicatable seeds?
>> 
>> That's the tricky part :) At least you have to avoid generating
>> clearly predictable seeds as the seed is your private key in this
>> case. With the seed anyone can reproduce the sequence.
>> 
>> crypto:strong_rand_bytes strives for better security properties, and I
>> understand it abstracts how to generate a good key for you, trying to
>> suck entropy from your system (so you may need to sit there banging
>> the keys and moving the mouse around for that ;) )
>> 
>> I am not a security expert by far, I just know some things that do not
>> work :). For things that work, the common approach is relying in
>> popular libraries not known to be broken. and trying not to use them
>> in a fancy way as the history is full of famous broken cryptographic
>> uses (you can read about flaws CSS, WEP, etc).
>> 
>> Of course, whether that approach is advisable or not is more a
>> philosophical question, not knowing they are not broken doesn't mean
>> that no one knows how to break them and has the key access information
>> is thought to be safely encrypted :)
>> 
>>> We also moved to "Tiny Mersenne Twister"
>>> (https://github.com/jj1bdx/tinymt-erlang) instead of using
>>> the standard random:uniform since the last Yaws security alert
>>> (http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2012-June/067626.html).
>>> Is this sufficient or should we also find a way to generate a unpredicatble
>>> seed for it?
>> 
>> As said, I am not a security expert, but as far as I can read, the
>> goals of that algorithm are to keep a small state with good
>> statistical properties, it says nothing about security (which doesn't
>> necessarily mean it is insecure, of course). A PRG can have good
>> statistical properties and still be insecure, being a secure PRG is a
>> stronger assumption. That is why erlang:random is fine for non
>> cryptographic uses, but for security you need something more complex.
>> 
>> Anyway, you always need a seed no one can guess. Same seed, same
>> sequence, so if someone guesses your seed it basically gets all your
>> passwords in return.
>> 
>> Regards
>> -- 
>> Samuel
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