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Date:      Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:02:50 -0700
From:      Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
To:        Per olof Ljungmark <peo@intersonic.se>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: /dev/random question
Message-ID:  <7C29870C-0AF0-41FC-98C6-C79FDC438474@mac.com>
In-Reply-To: <46E9A455.4090703@intersonic.se>
References:  <46E94F9A.6050707@intersonic.se> <20070913153630.GA9448@slackbox.xs4all.nl> <20070913173155.0bad12b2@gumby.homeunix.com> <20070913174537.GA11683@slackbox.xs4all.nl> <46E9A455.4090703@intersonic.se>

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On Sep 13, 2007, at 1:57 PM, Per olof Ljungmark wrote:
>> On the website it says that the original yarrow algorithm is no  
>> longer
>> supported. It seems to have been replaced by the fortuna algorithm.
>> I can't see from the source if /usr/src/sys/dev/random/yarrow.*  
>> use the
>> original yarrow algorithm, or the improved yarrow-160 aka fortuna.  
>> The use of
>> crypto/rijndael/rijndael-api-fst.h and crypto/sha2/sha2.h seem to
>> indicate the latter though.
>
> Should I conclude then that randomness is sufficient and  
> performance is a non-issue?

The randomness is considered to be strong, but you can perform the  
NIST FIPS-140 tests against /dev/random and decide for yourself.  As  
for performance, I get about 12MB/s out of /dev/random on a ~1 GHz  
CPU, which seems to be quite decent...

-- 
-Chuck




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