From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Feb 25 07:59:28 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id HAA10405 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Wed, 25 Feb 1998 07:59:28 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from phoenix.its.rpi.edu (dec@phoenix.its.rpi.edu [128.113.161.45]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id HAA10381 for ; Wed, 25 Feb 1998 07:59:04 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dec@phoenix.its.rpi.edu) Received: from localhost (dec@localhost) by phoenix.its.rpi.edu (8.8.8/8.8.7) with SMTP id KAA16912 for ; Wed, 25 Feb 1998 10:58:51 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from dec@phoenix.its.rpi.edu) Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 10:58:51 -0500 (EST) From: "David E. Cross" To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: /dev/random isn't Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I use /dev/random for a number of things that require secure random numbers. I recently noticed though that /dev/random seemed to be missing large chunks of the region. I decided to capture the random data, and construct a histogram of it. What I found was a bell curve (?!?!?!?), with a slightly large (but acceptable) SD of 0.17; however the low and high ends were 55 and 77 SDs away from the mean! Can anyone else verify this, do I need to change my rndcontrol IRQs? (currently set to the IRQ addresses of my Ethernet cards per the rndcontrol man page) Thank you -- David Cross To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message