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Last updated: May 08, 2023

MASTG-TEST-0063: Testing Random Number Generation

Overview

Static Analysis

In Swift, the SecRandomCopyBytes API is defined as follows:

func SecRandomCopyBytes(_ rnd: SecRandomRef?,
                      _ count: Int,
                      _ bytes: UnsafeMutablePointer<UInt8>) -> Int32

The Objective-C version is

int SecRandomCopyBytes(SecRandomRef rnd, size_t count, uint8_t *bytes);

The following is an example of the APIs usage:

int result = SecRandomCopyBytes(kSecRandomDefault, 16, randomBytes);

Note: if other mechanisms are used for random numbers in the code, verify that these are either wrappers around the APIs mentioned above or review them for their secure-randomness. Often this is too hard, which means you can best stick with the implementation above.

Dynamic Analysis

If you want to test for randomness, you can try to capture a large set of numbers and check with Burp's sequencer plugin to see how good the quality of the randomness is.