Werner Koch wrote: > On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 09:21, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > >> I upgraded to gcrypt 1.4.4 and I notice the same delay, and strace shows >> that /dev/random is being used even with this flag. > > What you do in certtool is to call > > if (info.quick_random != 0) > gcry_control (GCRYCTL_ENABLE_QUICK_RANDOM, 0); [...] > you see the flag can't be set in this case. What you need to do is > to set this flag during initialization: That is after a first call to > gcry_check_version. This is how it is done in by libgcrypt regression > tests. > Anyway, using this flag is strongly discouraged. It is only useful for > testing. gpg for example refuse to use a key if the random number > generator is in this mode and the User ID of the key is not flagged as > insecure. That is a bit paranoid but older version of libgcrypt even > did not used a strong RNG in the quick mode.
Why is this? As far as I understand the only difference was that it uses /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random. > If you want to use not so strong keys, you better use the transient-key > feature available since 1.4.2: > > @item transient-key > This is only meaningful for RSA keys. This is a flag with no value. If > given the RSA key is created using a faster and a somewhat less secure > random number generator. This flag may be used for keys which are only > used for a short time and do not require full cryptographic strength. Is this stronger than using /dev/urandom? regards, Nikos _______________________________________________ Help-gnutls mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gnutls
