Comment by throwawayffffas
5 days ago
The value space goes from 2^16, 2^32, 2^64 to 2^16 - 1, 2^32 - 1, and 2^64 - 1 respectively.
The bug has zero practical impact.
5 days ago
The value space goes from 2^16, 2^32, 2^64 to 2^16 - 1, 2^32 - 1, and 2^64 - 1 respectively.
The bug has zero practical impact.
It is absolutely untrue that a biased RNG has "zero practical impact." Modern cryptography has plenty of examples of relatively small biases leading to breaks. Check out Bleichenbacher's attack, for instance.
You could be correct that the very small bias here is not enough to be exploitable. But, given the history around this, it would be wrong to handwave it away as trivial.
Some cryptographic algorithms can be broken by this sort of bias (after 2^20, 2^35, or 2^70 operations), others are completely unaffected. There's certainly no excuse for not knowing, at least.