On Thu, 29 Jul 2010, Richard Salz wrote:
At shutdown, a process copies /dev/random to /var/random-seed which is used on reboots. Is this a good, bad, or "shrug, whatever" idea? I suppose the idea is that "all startup procs look the same" ?
"better then not". A lot of (pseudo)random comes from disk or network interrupts. These are often similar during stock system startup. It is even more important if there is no harddisk but flashdisk, which is not contribting to entropy of the system. This was a big issue for "openwrt" (a Linux on Linksys routers) which booted so similarly every time that there was not enough random left at all. By saving the entropy from a longer run system at shutdown, you increase the entropy of the next boot by adding randomness from the previous state(s) Paul --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [email protected]
