[Apologies to readers of debian-sparc, who have already received a copy of this]
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [EMAIL PROTECTED] write: [XDM randomness] >/dev/random? /dev/urandom? You are kidding. This randmomness is used >to create authorisation cookies for X which in my understanding provide >ZERO security. Use plain libc rand() and the security is exactly the same. In the situation where the X session is in practice running over unix sockets (or other configurations where all the data stays local to the machine without being vulnerable to network (or other) sniffing attacks)[1], the cookies in question provide the security that they were designed for - namely requiring a significant proportion of the space available to said cookies to be trawled to be able to send authenticated requests to the X server.[2] Jonathan. [1] Although, said server may be listening for tcpip connections, or those of other protocols to which the attacker can send their requests. [2] Having looked at the code, it is not obvious to me that the entropy produced in said cookies doesn't have a maximum of 32 bits, even if the cookie is longer than that.
