Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 20:33:15 +0100 From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> To: Mark Murray <markm@freebsd.org> Cc: Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: New entropy source proposal. Message-ID: <999.1110223995@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 07 Mar 2005 16:09:48 GMT." <200503071609.j27G9mR1032489@grovel.grondar.org>
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In message <200503071609.j27G9mR1032489@grovel.grondar.org>, Mark Murray writes : >Did you have a noise source connected? I generated 1MB of data and it was not >very random at all. "hexdump -C data" showed the data was very poor indeed. There will be a big difference between the microphone and line inputs in this respect. I'm quite reserved about this because of the hardware situation around soundcards (almost, but not quite entirely unlike each other), and the fact that a connected source may trick is into beliving we have random data when in fact we have not at all random data. A lot of caution is necessary. That said, a userland program which havests entropy from the soundcard and sticks it into the kernel may not be a bad idea, but we need to kill the notion "if it sounds like noise it is probably random" effectively in the documentation. (If you doubt me, listen to a 14.4 or faster modem). -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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