Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 08:45:31 -0400 From: George Mitchell <george+freebsd@m5p.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Does /dev/random in virtual guests provide good random data? Message-ID: <55A5046B.4090000@m5p.com> In-Reply-To: <20150714013342.GA79791@blazingdot.com> References: <55A2FB68.3070006@rawbw.com> <CCCC361E-70E1-4BA4-9765-65653F40DBC7@kientzle.com> <55A3763B.7010303@rawbw.com> <20150713144630.32cd851a@gumby.homeunix.com> <20150714013342.GA79791@blazingdot.com>
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On 07/13/15 21:33, Marcus Reid wrote: > On Mon, Jul 13, 2015 at 02:46:30PM +0100, RW via freebsd-hackers wrote: >> FreeBSD uses Yarrow > > As of recently, -CURRENT uses Fortuna by default, which is the successor > to Yarrow. It was also devised by Bruce Schneier (with Neils Ferguson). > >> , which was designed by Bruce Schneier, a professional cryptographer >> who created the Blowfish cipher, the AES candidate Twofish and PGP. > > PGP was created by Phil Zimmermann, not Schneier. > > Marcus > >> Linux's /dev/random was designed by programmers; actually a lot of >> them, its greatest problem is that it's a mess of patches from >> amateurs. > [...] Donald Knuth's excellent books on the Art of Computer Programming give an example of the pitfalls of programmers designing random number generators at the beginning of Chapter 3, "Random Numbers," with "Algorithm K" devised by Knuth himself in his youth. It converged almost immediately. "The moral to this story," writes Knuth, "is that /random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random/." (c) 1969 Addison-Wesley -- George
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