From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Nov 22 14:51:09 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id OAA22398 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Sun, 22 Nov 1998 14:51:09 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from beatrice.rutgers.edu (beatrice.rutgers.edu [165.230.209.143]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA22393 for ; Sun, 22 Nov 1998 14:51:06 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from easmith@beatrice.rutgers.edu) Received: (from easmith@localhost) by beatrice.rutgers.edu (980427.SGI.8.8.8/970903.SGI.AUTOCF) id RAA02458; Sun, 22 Nov 1998 17:50:20 -0500 (EST) From: "Allen Smith" Message-Id: <9811221750.ZM2456@beatrice.rutgers.edu> Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 17:50:20 -0500 In-Reply-To: Peter Jeremy "Re: freebsd-hackers-digest V4 #314" (Nov 22, 4:13pm) References: <98Nov23.081136est.40323@border.alcanet.com.au> X-Mailer: Z-Mail (3.2.3 08feb96 MediaMail) To: Peter Jeremy , hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: freebsd-hackers-digest V4 #314 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Nov 22, 4:13pm, Peter Jeremy (possibly) wrote: > On Fri, 20 Nov 1998 08:39:16 -0800 (PST), EE wrote: > >I'm looking for a password generator. > > And various people responded with things like: > "it's really piece of cake to write that kind of program in perl or C", > and a couple of people posted sample code. > > Unfortunately, all of the postings I've seen so far suffer from a > fatal flaw - all of them use pseudo-random numbers and hence generate > pseudo-random passwords. Well... no, actually, mine didn't. It uses pgp's random source, which is composed of key timings whenever you're entering text into it. > A true random password requires random numbers, which are very > difficult to generate within a computer. Depending on your needs, > /dev/random may be adequate (see random(4)). srandomdev(3) is a > start, but unfortunately uses /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random > and can quietly fall back to srandom(3) in some cases. Certainly, using /dev/random is nice... but the code I wrote was for IRIX originally. (It's possible that pgp 5 may use /dev/random if it's available; I haven't gotten around to downloading it yet and checking.) -Allen -- Allen Smith easmith@beatrice.rutgers.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message