From owner-freebsd-audit Sun Nov 28 11:44:16 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-audit@freebsd.org Received: by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix, from userid 758) id 3E47C150DB; Sun, 28 Nov 1999 11:44:15 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2CB271CD42D; Sun, 28 Nov 1999 11:44:15 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kris@hub.freebsd.org) Date: Sun, 28 Nov 1999 11:44:15 -0800 (PST) From: Kris Kennaway To: Warner Losh Cc: Dan Moschuk , freebsd-audit@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Last random PID patch before commit In-Reply-To: <199911281933.MAA86069@harmony.village.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-audit@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sun, 28 Nov 1999, Warner Losh wrote: > I believe that the entropy pool accumulates fast enough to use it for > every process, but that might be excessive and wasteful. Probably. You certainly want to reseed your random stream often, but OTOH I've found it fairly easy to drain the /dev/random pool by a couple of cooperating aggressively reading processes - in other words, there's not a whole lot there unless we keep a private pool in reserve (there was also a claim a while ago that we drastically overestimate our entropy, which I've been meaning to look into for a while). The papers by Schneier et al on www.counterpane.com on cryptographic RNGs describe the issues well. Kris > Warner ---- Just remember, as you celebrate Thanksgiving with your family feasts of turkey, cranberries, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, squash, corn, cornbread, apples, pickles, dumplings, fish, orangutans, fruitbats, breakfast cereals, and so forth, to keep in mind the true reason for the season: The birth of Santa. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-audit" in the body of the message