ICMC: Entropy Sources - Recommendations fo a Scalable, Repeatable and Comprehensive Evaluation Process

Sonu Shankar, Software Engineer, Cisco Systems
Alicia Squires, Manager, Global Certifications Team, Cisco
Ashit Vora, Lab Director and Co-Fonder, Acumen Security


When you're evaluating entropy your process has to be scalable, repeatable and comprehensive... well, comprehensive in a way that doesn't outweigh the assurance level you're going for. Ideally, the method used for the evaluation would be valid for FIPS-140 and Common Criteria.

Could we have the concept of a "module" certificate for entropy sources?

Let's think about the process for how we'd get here. we'd have to look at the Entropy Source: covering min-entropy estimation, review of built-in health tests, built-in oversampling, and a high-level design review.

There are several schemes that cover entropy and how to test it. You need to have a well documented description of the entropy source design, and leverage tools for providing statistical analysis of raw entropy.  It would be good to add statistical testing and heuristic analysis - but will vendors have the expertise to do this correctly?

How do you test for this?  First, you have to collect from raw entropy - disabling all of the conditioners (no hashing, LFSR, etc) - not always possible, as many chips also do the conditioning, so you cannot get the raw entropy. If you can't get the raw entropy, then it's not worth testing - as long as you've got good conditioning, it will  look like good entropy.

In order to run this test, you need to have at least one file of entropy contiaing 1 million symbols and the file has to be in binary format.

When it comes time to look at the results, the main metric is min-entropy.

You need to be careful, though, to not over sample from your entropy source and drain it. You need to be aware of how much entropy it can provide and use it appropriately. [* Not sure if I caught this correctly, as what I heard and saw didn't quite sync, and the slide moved away too quickly]

When it comes to reviewing noise source health test - need to catch catastrophic errors and reductions in entropy quality This is your first line of defense against side channel attacks. This may be implemented in software pre-DRBG or built-in to source.

Ideally, these entropy generators could have their own certificate, so that 3rd parties could use someone else's hardware for an entropy source - w/out having to worry difficult vendor NDA issues.