From owner-freebsd-current Mon Jul 17 6:58: 4 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from critter.freebsd.dk (critter.freebsd.dk [212.242.40.131]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 60AF037B64D; Mon, 17 Jul 2000 06:57:59 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from phk@critter.freebsd.dk) Received: from critter.freebsd.dk (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by critter.freebsd.dk (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA02615; Mon, 17 Jul 2000 15:57:36 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from phk@critter.freebsd.dk) To: alex@big.endian.de (Alexander Langer) Cc: "Louis A. Mamakos" , Mark Murray , "Andrey A. Chernov" , current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: randomdev entropy gathering is really weak In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 17 Jul 2000 15:45:49 +0200." <20000717154549.A18676@cichlids.cichlids.com> Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 15:57:36 +0200 Message-ID: <2613.963842256@critter.freebsd.dk> From: Poul-Henning Kamp Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <20000717154549.A18676@cichlids.cichlids.com>, Alexander Langer writ es: >Thus spake Poul-Henning Kamp (phk@critter.freebsd.dk): > >> I have thought about adding a entropy server to my array of weird >> servers in my lab. Something like a Geiger counter and a smokedetector >> could do wonders. > >HA! Cool! > >Do that please! > >I mean, seriously. >And an option to sysinstall, where you can enable this as you can with >ntpdate :) DuH! NTP is the perfect way to gather entropy at bootup! Predicting the clock's offset from reality and the two way path to the server of choice is impossible, plus if people enable authentication later on the packets will be choke full of high-quality entropy. We need an enterprising soul to add an option (default on) to ntpdate to write the received packets in toto to /dev/random if it exists. If somebody does this, I will spear-head the effort of getting it into the ntpv4 sources (Hmm, don't I have a commit bit there already ? Can't remember...) -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD coreteam member | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message