Hi Folks-- Frank from debian-nas.org wrote me off-list about entropy daemons, and agreed i could share his notes publicly.
He wrote: > haveged runs just fine on both my QNAP TS-109 (Marvell Kirkwood) and > Linksys NSLU2 (ixp4xx) ARM computers running Debian Squeeze. > > The amount of entropy from havaged is at least one if not more orders > of magnitude greater than what I get from a USB ADC with randomsound > or timer entropy daemon (http://www.vanheusden.com/te/). I've tested > the quality of the entropy with ENT ( > http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/ent), and it gives very good > results (passes all its tests of randomness). > > Compared to haveged, randomsound and timer entropy daemon provide too > little entropy to really make much of a difference on my ARM machines. I asked him about what kind of auditing he'd done, (e.g. whether he'd tried to bias the random pool through the processor for haveged), and he wrote back: > I haven't really looked into the details very much. All I did was measure the > output speed. Here's the results: > > Haveged > 335 kBps of entropy on a Marvell Kirkwood 1.2GHz ARMv5 CPU > 76-80 kBps of entropy on a Linksys NSLU2 @ 266Mhz > > Randomsound > 1.0 kBps of entropy when using the cheap '3D SOUND' USB audio stick or when > using the Hercules Muse Pocket USB as audio device on a Linksys NSLU2 @ 266Mhz > > Timer entropy daemon > produces ~34 bps of entropy on a Linksys NSLU2@266Mhz, while using 13-18% cpu > time > produces ~62 bps of entropy on a Intel Xeon 2.4Ghz Xen VPS, using 5% cpu time > > As you can see, Timer entropy daemon produces an insignificant amount of > entropy, Randomsound a bit more and haveged produces so much more that the > other two are irrelevant. Just passing on the interesting news, --dkg
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