Re: randomdev entropy gathering is really weak

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sun, 16 Jul 2000, Mark Murray wrote:

> > On Sun, Jul 16, 2000 at 08:26:44PM +0200, Mark Murray wrote:
> > 
> > > Gotcha - fix coming; I need to stash some randomness at shutdown time, and
> > > use that to reseed the RNG at reboot time.
> > 
> > ... and for installations where ssh-keygen is run the first time
> > the system boots?
> 
> The situation is _worse_; the entropy is minimal, and is _very_ attackable.

ssh-keygen should just block until it gets enough - this is not acceptable
behaviour if /dev/urandom is returning unseeded data. OpenSSL uses
/dev/urandom at the moment - I just read a comment in md_rand.c that using
/dev/random may block, which I didn't think was true.

On the other hand, doing a dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null gives me
infinite "randomness" at 10MB/sec - have the semantics of /dev/random
changed?

Kris

--
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