Re: randomdev entropy gathering is really weak

[Jeroen C. van Gelderen]

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, Mark Murray wrote:
> 
> > > 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?
> >
> > Yes; remember that what we have here is Yarrow algorithm; which is an
> > algorithm for cryptographically secure PRNG - one whose internal state
> > is unguessable, or if compromised folr some reason is self-recovering.
> >
> > "Infinite" randomness is possible with this algorithm.
> 
> On the other hand, didn't you say that at system boot the RNG is
> essentially unseeded, so this is actually a liability because processes
> cannot be sure they're getting real randomness.

/dev/random should block until it has seeded. If it does not
it's a bug. /dev/random should *never* spit out non-random
bytes.

Cheers,
Jeroen
-- 
Jeroen C. van Gelderen          o      _     _         _
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