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Randomness and the Netscape Browser (1996)
Communications has been at the forefront of the effort to integrate cryptographic techniques into Web servers and browsers. Netscape's Web browser supports the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), a cryptographic protocol developed by Netscape to provide secure Internet transactions.
Many common computer applications (games, for instance) use any readily available source of randomness to provide an initial value, called a "seed," to a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG). If the seed values for the PRNG can easily be guessed, the level of security offered by the program is diminished significantly, since it requires less work for an attacker to decrypt an intercepted message. That may sound like a lot of numbers to try, but several people (David Byers, Eric Young, Damien Doligez, Piete Brooks, Andrew Roos, Adam Back, Andy Brown and many others) have been able to try every possible key and recover SSL- encrypted data in as few as 30 hours using spare CPU cycles from many machines.
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