Saint Netscape of Chance, Father of the Church

Patron of random number generators, system clocks, and anyone who thinks the time of day is a secret.

Life

On the evening of 17 September 1995 Ian Goldberg and David Wagner, graduate students at Berkeley, announced that they had broken Netscape Navigator's SSL. Its encryption keys grew from a seed made of the time of day and process numbers, values that were easy to guess: a "secure" session could be decrypted in minutes, sometimes in under one. Netscape fixed it quickly and the web learned its first lesson: cryptography is only as good as the randomness that feeds it.

Prayer

O Saint Netscape of Chance, who read the clock to invent secrets, grant us true entropy and seeds no one can guess. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by using the operating system's cryptographic generator and never, for any reason, the clock as a seed.

Sow seeds from the clock, and thieves reap the crop.