Entropy Starvation & Weak-Key Bugs

Entropy starvation occurs when a system lacks sufficient unpredictable input to seed its CSPRNG. This happens on newly booted embedded devices, virtualized servers, or systems with no user input. The RNG output becomes predictable.

In 2006, a Debian developer removed a line flagged by Valgrind: MD_Update(&m, buf, j). This line was the entropy source. The result: OpenSSL on Debian only seeded with the PID (max 32,768 values). All keys generated 2006-2008 are in a set of 32,768 possibilities.