Earlier this month, Google announced that a security compromise had been found which affects applications that improperly initialize, or fail to initialize completely, the PRNG (pseudorandom number generator) before using it for key generation, signing, or random number generation.
On the Android Developers Blog, Alex Klyubin, Android Security Engineer, stated that “We have now determined that applications which use the Java Cryptography Architecture (JCA) for key generation, signing, or random number generation may not receive cryptographically strong values on Android devices due to improper initialization of the underlying PRNG. Applications that directly invoke the system-provided OpenSSL PRNG without explicit initialization on Android are also affected”, but also noted that “Applications that establish TLS/SSL connections using the HttpClient and java.net classes are not affected as those classes do seed the OpenSSL PRNG with values from /dev/urandom.”
The Android Developers Blog link provides Android developers with a workaround, suggesting that the PRNG be initialized with entropy from /dev/urandom or /dev/random.
For our wolfSSL and wolfCrypt users on Android, applications should not be affected as wolfSSL and wolfCrypt seed their PRNG from /dev/urandom or /dev/random by default. When using crypto directly through wolfCrypt, this happens when the application calls InitRng(). When using SSL/TLS through wolfSSL, the PRNG is automatically seeded.
For users who want to write their own seed generation code, wolfSSL and wolfCrypt allow programmers to define NO_DEV_RANDOM and write their own GenerateSeed() function in
“Some SecureRandom Thoughts”, Android Developers Blog: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/08/some-securerandom-thoughts.html