[It's a kind of Mag'ic]

Executive Summary: BADLY!

At first I want to admit that this test may be silly but is fast and simple
All test were done on my Lenovo Z61p running recent Fedora9 – debian openssl was compiled from source

So, how to test what commenting out one line in openssl code changes?

Let’s generate some random numbers using openssl. Quick, dirty and lame solution:

$ for i in `seq 100000`; do ./openssl rand -base64 40 >> test; done  

and now quick check for randomness of this data:

$ wc -l test; cat test | sort| uniq -c | sort | tail

Results:

Fedora openssl:

mag@viper:~$ wc -l test

100000 test   

mag@viper:~$ wc -l test; cat test | sort| uniq -c | sort | tail

100000 test

      1 ZzvfJF8Sh8s59kU+/hNoK8F4FfbyIoG7qY9NObjd24PwvMzm6CHuzw==

      1 ZZVN89z8LONs8nbk49enpEYbm47iZF8bFc0kvFwyEr0MzLuzOiQqQA==

      1 zZwbc+wuPBMCdR6gEXjkkaxrFF+Capaw8INv0DPhi8paqcTbvxX86w==

      1 ZZx1dP0xMsceZl9ozVeUvQgEP9AmE/56a+CgdIO8kCCDI6DdDTrxeA==

      1 zzxnavFvysTxniMWv+a0Rxyu1XtCZ2UZN5pVAB3b5FAtIZx+5EttqA==

      1 ZzyKbqW87iekJtK9niDu0FwKnR5ENXnKdKJFcCbNAp2qqEw9yrTn5A==

      1 zZZ9K7L4n7qKH5E5GYDaIZLchQvSn7e/g1FPL8SmZF+NW+1i3H3XRw==

      1 Zz/z9kwIDywXrxtrTNmWy9gFGGcass9k3g8fe8DTae3lCiAukILUtg==

      1 +zZ/ZKKqv5YQagg3HSpp2hLrFSuPIRRg0nDOEwZ2hf935Gk6zS7TFA==

      1 zZZwoogf3Ib5Xg9WMnMU/4IP2mbbvXhuecSnofxqscLg1QpA4R6N3g==

Everything looks fine all seeds are unique, now debian openssl:

Debian openssl:

mag@viper:~/tmp/openssl-0.9.8g/apps$ wc -l test

100000 test   

mag@viper:~/tmp/openssl-0.9.8g/apps$ wc -l test; cat test | sort| uniq -c | sort | tail

100000 test

      4 zYgla7UVURkIGH9Bol2otXKSTYfr/NBIVZa/68FKeidHgbtSAIVNog==

      4 zYJLIAIxG8AMtrf6smNMsdZFBADCQPyuZHQTmGFWnJg6PwESLL2e8g==

      4 ZyKePqCM93yGcYkNxlHJ0/y7ZOhAEtXJyyi4H6JVzUcRpe+2zhJeZg==

      4 zyuCidG1FPJm8Ut4CshJvI5A+g3SDvmFZ4lIN+ESUCA/m8DU1aJ5ww==

      4 ZZbFf3M7R0Pl+VPkJD9TJzsqSVbgCxydAJVzS8f752pYfXCyzVNP1g==

      4 zzrbuvwbw8XN61Bygi8KEKMUI7qOVZmQmglJYua/Zp7dDFH/Z45mJQ==

      4 zztQ5wdvkWiwCIEJpkSvyqkrVgb32UccogSmZwNRlLH7ieIZvXU+/A==

      4 zZUGNwhNUFHCdkPnHFYW0ME1+MlFwSo3eb1rLOwjDfL5FyHHqvFQ4g==

      4 zZVYlHlCIH4XHveWvvWgES2AwHuhy3aiIQk2JvyE7T3VKdNCWZU9QA==

      4 zzZPx/Z5iE29WkCpTVKunmo102m4p3GYHzXZ6B/TRgKSUFkJScGVqA==

Quick interpretation of results – first column is count of repeating seed. So in 100000 tries debian openssl random() generated 4 times same 40 byte string.
This was used for openssh/ssl/etc key generation…

Conclusion: debian openssl was UNABLE to generate random numbers AT ALL!

and nobody noticed :-/

I leave the rest to you, happy regenerating all CA and ssl certificates. I only wonder what if Verisign or other “trusted” company used this for main CA generation.

If you think something is terribly wrong with this test please comment