It'd be nice if there was at least a way to explicitly detect if you were getting "weaker" entropy... In linux, for example, there is a /proc filesystem entry (/proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail) that indicates how much entropy is available in the pool.
Shabsi On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 2:30 PM, Glenn Maynard <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 5:08 PM, Adam Barth <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Brendan Eich <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> > On Feb 14, 2011, at 12:26 PM, Adam Barth wrote: >> > > Ok. I'll write up a spec later today. >> > >> > Thanks. >> >> Done: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Crypto >> >> Feedback appreciated. >> > > > If insufficient cryptographically random values are available, > getRandomValues does not alter array and throws a NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR > > I'm not sure if this means "if you're using /dev/random and it would block, > throw", or "if the amount of entropy in the PRNG's entropy pool is low, > throw", but they both seem hard to deal with from scripts. There's no way > to know when to try again, and most applications wanting secure PRNGs don't > need this. Even ssh-keygen seems to simply use /dev/urandom without > worrying about it returning low-entropy randomness. > > I think it makes more sense to imply /dev/urandom's behavior: always return > data, even if the entropy pool is low. If there's a need for randomness > with that stronger guarantee of entropy, that seems like it would want an > asynchronous API in order to wait for entropy (akin to /dev/random). > > -- > Glenn Maynard >
_______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
