Am Donnerstag 29 Juli 2010, 21:47:01 schrieb Richard Salz: > 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" ?
Indeed. The boot process of a machine is very deterministic and if you do not have any Hardware RNG you need to seed /dev/random. At least old Linux kernels (2.4) also overestimate the entropy in the pool by about 30% which is especially a problem when you generate ssh host keys during system installation. Bye Thomas -- Thomas Biege <tho...@suse.de>, SUSE LINUX, Security Support & Auditing SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg) -- Wer aufhoert besser werden zu wollen, hoert auf gut zu sein. -- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com