Spectral Emanation <[email protected]> wrote: >>No problem on a typical Linux desktop; it does not do much crypto and >>/dev/random gets input from keyboard & mouse movement, disk delays, etc. >>However, it might be a major problem for a plug server that does more crypto, >>runs headless, and use solid state storage. > > I have found this to be a problem on my plug computer. It takes > minutes to generate a key in OpenSSL or GPG. To get around this I am > using a two-dollar USB sound adapter from China and the service > "RandomSound" (http://www.digital-scurf.org/software/randomsound) Now > there is plenty of entropy. I have done some simple tests to the best > of my limited ability, and the data seems to be random.
Consider Turbid as an alternate way to get randomness from a sound device. It has some solid analysis behind it, link in first post above. > There is a project called Pandora where a group of people got together > and designed and built a custom portable gaming machine based on the > ARM OMAP3 platform. I would love to see something similar done to get > a custom plugcomputer designed and built ... > We could figure out all the issues we want to address and then get > custom hardware that is branded by the Freedombox project. The > Sheevaplug was created to be extended by vendors, why not us if we can > get enough people to commit to buying one? I would think we want something that runs on cheap commodity hardware, rather than a custom solution. However, most of the commodity hardware is built by companies in the OEM market (Company A builds it but puts Company B's name on it) and most of those guys would happily build for us if we had a big enough order, so your suggestion is certainly not impossible. Peter Gutmann (a very credible guy) did a Usenix paper titled "An Open-source Cryptographic Coprocessor". http://www.cypherpunks.to/~peter/usenix00.pdf That would be a fine starting point for some of what you suggest, but it would involve getting chips fabbed, which I'd say is a long way outside our brief. _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
