Random Sanity Project

As of July 2020, this project is no longer being maintained.

The Random Sanity Project was a free, open source service that helps secure the Internet by sanity-checking sources of randomness. If you are a CTO or system administrator responsible for a security-critical web server or application running on the Internet you should consider using this service to alert you of catastrophic hardware or software failures that could completely compromise the security of your website or application.

How it Worked

1. Get an array of 64 bytes from whatever source of cryptographically-secure randomness you are using
2. Encode them as hex, and make a REST query to the randomsanity service
3. The service will return ‘true’ if it those bytes look random and nobody else has submitted the same stream of bytes; otherwise it will return ‘false’.

For example, if you are using openssl as your source of randomness, you could sanity-test it with this bash code:

BYTES=$(openssl rand -hex 64)
curl http://rest.randomsanity.org/v1/q/$BYTES

You should see “true” as the result. Re-run the curl command with the same BYTES and the result will be “false”, because a good source of randomness will never generate the same 64 bytes twice (with insanely high probability). See the details page if you’re curious about exactly what it is doing with your bytes.

Getting Started

Read the API documentation. If you’re running Debian or Ubuntu, install the check /dev/urandom at startup init.d script; if you’re running RedHat/Fedora/CentOS, Luke Macken has created a systemd startup script that does the check.