From owner-freebsd-current Fri Jul 21 3:53:35 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from freefall.freebsd.org (freefall.FreeBSD.ORG [204.216.27.21]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F119637B8E2; Fri, 21 Jul 2000 03:53:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) Received: from localhost (kris@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.9.3/8.9.2) with ESMTP id DAA27222; Fri, 21 Jul 2000 03:53:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kris@FreeBSD.org) X-Authentication-Warning: freefall.freebsd.org: kris owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 03:53:31 -0700 (PDT) From: Kris Kennaway To: George Michaelson Cc: Paul Herman , Poul-Henning Kamp , Vadim Belman , current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: randomdev entropy gathering is really weak In-Reply-To: <16536.963966737@dstc.edu.au> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, George Michaelson wrote: > Where for instance do these ideas fit into the models proposed in > > draft-eastlake-randomness2-00.txt > > or the proceeding RFC? Well, Yarrow is an algorithm which is intended to provide a robust and secure source of cryptographic-strength random numbers (i.e. suitable for the purposes described in that draft). I dont think it's specifically mentioned there, but it's defined and described in a series of papers by Schneier et al. available on www.counterpane.com. As for the other parts of that document, it looks like there might be some useful discussion of entropy sources on commodity PC hardware and the issues with sampling such sources - I'll have to read it in more detail (and suggest other interested participants in this discussion also do so, along with the Yarrow papers). Thanks for pointing it out! Kris -- In God we Trust -- all others must submit an X.509 certificate. -- Charles Forsythe To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message