On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Michael Rogers <[email protected]> wrote:
>> http://www.digital-scurf.org/software/randomsound > > Thanks, I've had a quick look at the source and it looks promising. > Unlike Turbid it doesn't try to produce high-quality randomness on its > own, it just contributes bits to the kernel's entropy pool. Turbid can do that too, of course. > So I guess > the next question is, what happens if you contribute completely > predictable bits to the entropy pool? Would it harm the quality of > /dev/random to do so? No. All the mixing operations in the driver are invertible. They never do x = input, always x ^= input or x += input, so adding known bits does not destroy entropy but only moves it around. Writes of known data to /dev/random are harmless. What can do damage is increasing the /dev/random entropy estimate by more than the number of bits you added. That cannot be done by writing. Increasing the estimate is done with a root--only ioctl call. _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
