Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 7 Mar 2005 14:03:30 +0100
From:      Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@FreeBSD.org>
To:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   New entropy source proposal.
Message-ID:  <20050307130330.GX9291@darkness.comp.waw.pl>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

--XwYplyRgqW9Nm5hN
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-2
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hi.

I've been playing a bit with "use sound card as an entropy source" idea.
This simple program does what I wanted:

	http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/sndrand.tbz

The program is very simple, it should be run with two arguments:

	% sndtest /dev/dspW 1048576 > rand.data

This command will generate 1MB of random data.

With my sound card:

pcm0: <Intel ICH3 (82801CA)> port 0xe100-0xe13f,0xe000-0xe0ff irq 11 at dev=
ice 31.5 on pci0
pcm0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
pcm0: <Cirrus Logic CS4299 AC97 Codec>

It produce very good entropy. I tried those tests to prove its quality:
- FIPS 140-2 tests
- 'ent' tests: http://www.fourmilab.ch/random/
- Famous 'diehard' tests

The full output from diehard tests is here:

	http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/sndrand_diehard.txt

The idea of using sound card as entropy source was taken from RFC 1750.

If people like the idea and someone more skilled than me in this subject
can review this stuff, we can start to put it into kernel
"random infrastructure". It could also be implemented as userland daemon
which writes collected entropy to /dev/random maybe...

--=20
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheel.pl
pjd@FreeBSD.org                           http://www.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD committer                         Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!

--XwYplyRgqW9Nm5hN
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Disposition: inline

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (FreeBSD)

iD8DBQFCLFEiForvXbEpPzQRAvqoAKCS6Uog2CINyj3ybNo1a8C/qAbUQQCcDP1T
KkECG+WdYlnJyLZkuaiW0FA=
=l8tH
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--XwYplyRgqW9Nm5hN--



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20050307130330.GX9291>