From owner-freebsd-current  Tue Jul 18  7:43: 7 2000
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Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 10:40:22 -0400
From: Dan Moschuk <dan@FreeBSD.ORG>
To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
Cc: "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>,
	Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za>,
	"Andrey A. Chernov" <ache@FreeBSD.ORG>, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: randomdev entropy gathering is really weak
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References: <200007171319.JAA04774@whizzo.transsys.com> <2450.963841019@critter.freebsd.dk>
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| >In fact, it would be rather interesting to have a configuration flag which
| >always forces something like an fsck on a file system in order to provide
| >some entropy to the random device.  Or some other user-exposed way of
| >providing entropy.  I might have some data on disk, or some network
| >operations which can be performed to help seed the entropy pool.
| 
| What we really need is this:
| 
| 	fetch -o http://entropy.freebsd.org/ > /dev/random
| 
| with a bunch of volounteers providing random bits to people in need.
| 
| I have thought about adding a entropy server to my array of weird
| servers in my lab.  Something like a Geiger counter and a smokedetector
| could do wonders.

If you wanted to have some fun with this, you could do a rc5-like distributed
client, feeding random bits to a server, and pulling down new bits every
so often!

-Dan


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