On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 05:45:55PM -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote: > On Sun, 09 Dec 2007, Marc Haber wrote: > > during a discussion on the LKML, it was suggested to do "dmesg > > > dev/random" in the startups scrips of a distribution. Please > > consider doing this in Debian. > > Debian already seeds /dev/random with data from the last shutdown. And > there is little entropy in dmesg. Maybe we could do dmesg | gzip, to > increase the entropy per bit of data a lot, but it still doesn't help much: > since the output of dmesg doesn't change much from one boot to the next > one, that could open an avenue of attack on the initial state of the PRNG. > > Exactly why do you want to do this?
Ted suggested this to get some system-dependent information (for example, the MAC address) into the entropy pool to avoid identical systems to be seeded identically. Greetings Marc -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things." Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 3221 2323190 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
