Going in-depth on the Windows 10 random number generation infrastructure

Throughout the years, we’ve had ongoing conversations with researchers, developers, and customers around our implementation of certain security features within the Windows operating system. Most recently, we have open-sourced our cryptography libraries as a way to contribute and show our continued support to the security community

For our most recent contribution, we have decided to go in-depth on our implementation of pseudo-random number generation in Windows 10.

We are happy to release to the public The Windows 10 random number generation infrastructure white paper.

This whitepaper explores details about the Windows 10 pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) infrastructure, and lists the primary RNG APIs. The whitepaper also explains how the entropy system works, what the entropy sources are, and how initial seeding works.

We expect academic and security researchers, as well as operating system developers and people with an in-depth understanding of random number generation, to get the most value out of this whitepaper. Note: Some of the terminology used in this whitepaper assumes prior knowledge of random number generators and entropy collection terms.

We welcome and look forward to your feedback on this whitepaper and the technologies it describes in the comments below. We also appreciate any reports of security vulnerabilities that you may find in our implementation.

The post Going in-depth on the Windows 10 random number generation infrastructure appeared first on Microsoft Security.

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