From owner-freebsd-current Mon Jul 17 18:33:21 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from cypherpunks.ai (cypherpunks.ai [209.88.68.47]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6988F37B633; Mon, 17 Jul 2000 18:33:16 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jeroen@vangelderen.org) Received: from vangelderen.org (grolsch.ai [209.88.68.214]) by cypherpunks.ai (Postfix) with ESMTP id 335C34C; Mon, 17 Jul 2000 21:33:15 -0400 (AST) Message-ID: <3973B3DB.EAC14E82@vangelderen.org> Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 21:33:15 -0400 From: "Jeroen C. van Gelderen" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.12 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Kris Kennaway Cc: Mark Murray , current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: randomdev entropy gathering is really weak References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 _ _ _ jeroen@vangelderen.org _o /\_ _ \\o (_)\__/o (_) _< \_ _>(_) (_)/<_ \_| \ _|/' \/ (_)>(_) (_) (_) (_) (_)' _\o_ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message