Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 16:09:48 +0000 From: Mark Murray <markm@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: markm@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New entropy source proposal. Message-ID: <200503071609.j27G9mR1032489@grovel.grondar.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 07 Mar 2005 14:03:30 %2B0100." <20050307130330.GX9291@darkness.comp.waw.pl>
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Pawel Jakub Dawidek writes: > The program is very simple, it should be run with two arguments: > > % sndtest /dev/dspW 1048576 > rand.data > > This command will generate 1MB of random data. Er, not very random. > With my sound card: > > pcm0: <Intel ICH3 (82801CA)> port 0xe100-0xe13f,0xe000-0xe0ff irq 11 at dev= > ice 31.5 on pci0 > pcm0: [GIANT-LOCKED] > pcm0: <Cirrus Logic CS4299 AC97 Codec> Did you have a noise source connected? I generated 1MB of data and it was not very random at all. "hexdump -C data" showed the data was very poor indeed. > It produce very good entropy. I tried those tests to prove its quality: > - FIPS 140-2 tests > - 'ent' tests: http://www.fourmilab.ch/random/ > - Famous 'diehard' tests > > The full output from diehard tests is here: > > http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/sndrand_diehard.txt > > The idea of using sound card as entropy source was taken from RFC 1750. That RFC mentions connecting the sound card to a noise source. > If people like the idea and someone more skilled than me in this subject > can review this stuff, we can start to put it into kernel > "random infrastructure". It could also be implemented as userland daemon > which writes collected entropy to /dev/random maybe... I like the idea, but we need a bit more hardware assistance, I think. M -- Mark Murray iumop ap!sdn w,I idlaH
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