From owner-freebsd-audit Sun Nov 28 11:11:46 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-audit@freebsd.org Received: from rover.village.org (rover.village.org [204.144.255.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D9E5514E79; Sun, 28 Nov 1999 11:11:41 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from imp@harmony.village.org) Received: from harmony.village.org (harmony.village.org [10.0.0.6]) by rover.village.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA29462; Sun, 28 Nov 1999 12:11:39 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from imp@harmony.village.org) Received: from harmony.village.org (localhost.village.org [127.0.0.1]) by harmony.village.org (8.9.3/8.8.3) with ESMTP id MAA85867; Sun, 28 Nov 1999 12:11:52 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <199911281911.MAA85867@harmony.village.org> To: Dan Moschuk Subject: Re: Last random PID patch before commit Cc: Kris Kennaway , freebsd-audit@FreeBSD.ORG In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 28 Nov 1999 13:04:32 EST." <19991128130432.C33028@november.jaded.net> References: <19991128130432.C33028@november.jaded.net> <19991128012420.A48334@spirit.jaded.net> Date: Sun, 28 Nov 1999 12:11:52 -0700 From: Warner Losh Sender: owner-freebsd-audit@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <19991128130432.C33028@november.jaded.net> Dan Moschuk writes: : Correct. That's probably not the best way of doing it, however, I'm not : convinced that /dev/random is the best way either. My other idea was to : leave key[256] uninitialized and just use whatever happens to be there. Hmmm. I think this is a bad idea. The key won't be sufficently random since you can count on a number of bits in the stack garbage being set due to kernel addresses. This weakens the resulting randomness from 2048 bits down to 1500ish bits (assumnig that my read of the code gives key a 8 bit size). What's wrong with the /dev/random random number stream? This is exactly the sort of thing that it is designed for.... Warner To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-audit" in the body of the message