Rasp Pi Generates Weak SSH Keys

The Debian-based Raspbian Linux system, which runs on the tiny and popular Raspberry Pi single-board computer systems, appears to have a problem generating potentially weak SSH keys. Because the Rasp Pi doesn't come with a monitor, many Pi owners use SSH as a primary means of communicating with the system. And although a majority of the consumer-end Pis are sitting behind firewalls on little home networks (uh, how safe are those little home firewalls?), Internet-connected Raspberry Pis have started to appear as web servers, weather stations, remote photography experiments, and security cameras.

The Register quotes a Rasp Pi message board note, “Many Linux distributions stockpile random seed data during installation, and then use that to prime the pool during first boot-up, but Raspbian doesn't work that way – it starts up ready to go straight from the SD card, and thus suffers from low entropy.”

On current Raspbian systems, hardware random number generation isn't enabled by default. The system uses the random data in the /dev/urandom pool to generate a host key, but the pool doesn't have enough entropy at the early stage where the keys are created.

The Raspbian developers say they will fix the issue in the next release. In the meantime, users who are concerned about SSH security should use the Pi's onboard hardware random number generator to see the /dev/urandom file and regenerate SSH host keys.