From owner-freebsd-alpha Tue Jul 11 8:50:52 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Received: from malkavian.org (malkavian.org [206.136.132.23]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 143EE37BEB5 for ; Tue, 11 Jul 2000 08:50:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from rbw@myplace.org) Received: from localhost (rbw@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by malkavian.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA41155; Tue, 11 Jul 2000 11:50:38 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from rbw@myplace.org) Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 08:50:38 -0700 (MST) From: "brian j. peterson" To: Matthew Zahorik Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: /dev/[u]random on Alphas? In-Reply-To: <000f01bfeb48$e1b4d300$1401eed8@mahatma> Message-ID: X-Prime: (2 ^ 6972593) - 1 X-URL: http://rbw.myplace.org/ MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Matthew Zahorik wrote: # /dev/urandom and /dev/random don't work on Alpha boxes under FreeBSD # 4.0-RELEASE # # alpha/alpha/mem.c doesn't have the case 3 and case 4 in mmrw() that the i386 # code does. # # Is this a known problem/limitation, and is there a workaround? # # Right now my SSL web servers are using fixed files as the random number # seed, rather than /dev/urandom. Not a great source of entropy. forgive the length of this url, but here is the FreeBSD Security Advisory on the matter: http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=17867+0+archive/2000/freebsd-security/20000618.freebsd-security for some reason, it wasn't listed at http://www.freebsd.org/security/#adv . -brian -- --===-----=======-----------=============-----------------=================== | rbw aka bjp | god's final message to his creation: | | rbw@myplace.org | we apologize for the inconvenience. | ===================-----------------=============-----------=======-----===-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message