On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 11:45, Vladas Shukevichus wrote: > 18.01.2005 18:06:31 > Marek Kilimajer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > M. Sokolewicz wrote: > > > didn't you read what wez said? they're gathering entropy... you > *can't* > > > (and shouldn't want to) prevent that. > > > > > > > Or get some good entropy source > > Can you explain this a bit? How can I do this? >
Now you getting back to the "there are only six people in the world that understand encryption deal" :) entropy in these terms ( as I understand it ) is a source of randomness used by open ssl. I believe /dev/random is the source for this on a linux system. various system events cause random characters to be added to the entropy pool that is then accessed via /dev/random. I rna into this a couple of years ago setting up a freeswan link that was taking forever (hours) to generate the keys. Turns out that since I was on a headless scsi system there was a severe lack of entropy. At the time, ide hard drive activity, mouse events and possibly keyboard activity were the primary inputs into the pool. If your system needs a lot of randomness there are various random number generators available. Do some searching, cryptogeeks take thier randomness very seriously. I had no idea until I ran into this. The coolest one I found was a lavalamp array that had a camera pointed at it and the output was massaged to generate the random data. Last I heard, even this was being debated as to whether it was random enough. this is important enough that Via puts a random number generator built into the epia boards so appliances will have enough of an entropy pool to quickly establish vpns. Have fun learing about it. I did. Having said all this, you might try moving the server mouse around immediatly before and during the transaction to see if its faster. HTH Bret -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
