snake-oil-security writes “Last fall Amit Klein found a serious weakness in the OpenBSD PRNG (pseudo-random number generator), which grants an attacker to predict the next DNS transaction ID. The same flavor of this PRNG is used in other places like the OpenBSD kernel network stack. Several other BSD operating systems copied the OpenBSD code for their own PRNG, so they’re vulnerable too; Apple’s Darwin-based Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, and also NetBSD, FreeBSD, and DragonFlyBSD. All the above-mentioned vendors were contacted in November 2007. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFlyBSD committed a fix to their respective source code trees, Apple refused to provide any schedule for a fix, but OpenBSD decided not to mend it. OpenBSD’s coordinator stated, in an email, that OpenBSD is completely uninterested in the problem and that the problem is absolutely irrelevant in the real world. This was highlighted recently when Amit Klein posted to the BugTraq list.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Entries (RSS)