Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 21:33:15 -0400 From: "Jeroen C. van Gelderen" <jeroen@vangelderen.org> To: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: randomdev entropy gathering is really weak Message-ID: <3973B3DB.EAC14E82@vangelderen.org> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0007170003110.2839-100000@freefall.freebsd.org>
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Kris Kennaway wrote:
>
> On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, Mark Murray wrote:
>
> > > On the other hand, doing a dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null gives me
> > > infinite "randomness" at 10MB/sec - have the semantics of /dev/random
> > > changed?
> >
> > Yes; remember that what we have here is Yarrow algorithm; which is an
> > algorithm for cryptographically secure PRNG - one whose internal state
> > is unguessable, or if compromised folr some reason is self-recovering.
> >
> > "Infinite" randomness is possible with this algorithm.
>
> On the other hand, didn't you say that at system boot the RNG is
> essentially unseeded, so this is actually a liability because processes
> cannot be sure they're getting real randomness.
/dev/random should block until it has seeded. If it does not
it's a bug. /dev/random should *never* spit out non-random
bytes.
Cheers,
Jeroen
--
Jeroen C. van Gelderen o _ _ _
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