A little birdie told me that Ian Goldberg said:
As some of you may recall, a few weeks ago I posted a reverse-compilation of the random number generation routine used by netscape to choose challenge data and encryption keys.
Recently, one of my officemates (David Wagner <daw@cs.berkeley.edu>) and I (Ian Goldberg <iang@cs.berkeley.edu>) finished the job of seeing exactly how the encryption keys are picked.
What we discovered is that, at least on the systems we checked (Solaris and HP-UX), the seed value for the RNG was fairly trivial to guess by someone with an account on the machine running netscape (so much so that in this situation, it usually takes less than 1 minute to find the key), and not too hard for people without accounts, either.
Makes one wonder what the seed is on a Windows implementation... If it's only the time, you can probably approximate what the clock is set to within a couple of minutes (if the timezone of the client is known). -- Kevin Prigge | Holes in whats left of my reason, CIS Consultant | holes in the knees of my blues, Computer & Information Services | odds against me been increasin' email: klp@cis.umn.edu | but I'll pull through...