On: Exploit Information Leaks in Random Numbers from Python, Ruby and PHP

[jgrahamc]

Funny, that someone did this. I wanted to implement something similar to check that GCHQ weren't lying to me about this: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/12/back-channel-confirms-that-im-ri... Essentially, I thought that it was possible that this block of code was not what they actually used (partially because 0x7f did not appear in the output).

I didn't do it because I had only 326 bytes of random material with 7 bits per byte. Too little to recover the state.

[marshray → jgrahamc]

Depends on how much state they seeded it with. It's pretty common for MT to be seeded with 32 or less bits of entropy.