On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 10:19:53PM -0500, Rich Salz wrote:
> I'm putting together a system that might need to generate thousands of RSA
> keypairs per day, using OpenSSL on a "handful" of Linux machines. What do
> folks think of the following: take one machine and dedicate it as an entropy
> source. After 'n' seconds turn the network card into promiscuous mode, scoop
> up packets and hash them, dump them into the entropy pool. Do this for 'm'
> seconds, then go back to sleep for awhile. The sleep and wake times are
> random numbers. Other systems on the newtwork periodically make an SSL
> connection to the entropy box, read bytes, and dump it into their /dev/random
> device.
>
> Is this a cute hack, pointless, or a good idea?
Does your security model includes the possibility of attackers getting
to the network that the entropy host is on? I'd guess it does
if you're going to make requesters connect with SSL to retreive
entropy. Then it's on the pointless side, since the attacker only has to
solve the problem of when to turn on/off his snooping the network
to duplicate that part of the entropy pool. That's pretty much
the "pick a key from a CD" model...
--
Eric Murray Consulting Security Architect SecureDesign LLC
http://www.securedesignllc.com PGP keyid:E03F65E5
