From owner-freebsd-arch Mon Jun 19 13:40:31 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from freefall.freebsd.org (freefall.FreeBSD.ORG [204.216.27.21]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A5C8A37B5B9; Mon, 19 Jun 2000 13:40:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) Received: from localhost (kris@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.9.3/8.9.2) with ESMTP id NAA42720; Mon, 19 Jun 2000 13:40:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) X-Authentication-Warning: freefall.freebsd.org: kris owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 13:40:29 -0700 (PDT) From: Kris Kennaway To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav Cc: Poul-Henning Kamp , Dan Moschuk , "Jeroen C. van Gelderen" , Mark Murray , arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: (2nd iteration) New /dev/(random|null|zero) - review, please In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 19 Jun 2000, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: > But this is all guesses and gut feelings, and experience teaches us > that guesses and gut feelings are often - if not always - wrong when > it comes to crypto and randomness, so feel free to ignore me. In this usage it won't matter, as long as the thermal generator is "mostly" random (i.e. the entropy estimate of how much random data it actually contains is approximately correct), because the bytes aren't used directly but fed into the /dev/random entropy pool and hashed up, which would tend to remove any signature. Kris -- In God we Trust -- all others must submit an X.509 certificate. -- Charles Forsythe To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message