What are the characteristics of those who generated an RSA key sharing a prime factor? Can they be linked back to a few bad CSPRNG implementations?
What are practical steps to be responsible about it?
It's contrived, but I just imagine that if I'm generating some particularly important keys, that I should somehow find a way to give /dev/urandom a kick of some kind. Even if that were possible, it's more likely to make things worse than better. Still, it makes me a little paranoid to even hear about theoretical weaknesses -- especially like collision attacks. I have no idea how long it takes for the CSPRNG to get properly seeded. Does it take a microsecond after booting? 10 minutes? A day?
Some RNG's use the time of the day in milliseconds as seed, I guess those are easy to brute force. I guess it's all about the size of the seed and it's randomness!?
This is probably the most famous issue about that phenomenon:
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/ddj-netscape.ht...
You could say that our understanding of PRNGs has improved a bit since then.
A recent thread about brute-forcing PRNG states in a game: