13Jan2008 (UTC+ 8) On 1/13/08, Gerald Timothy Quimpo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > with a robot to move the mouse, randomly press keys, and some programs > to pump data through the network interface, to generate "random data", > maybe just have tcpdump sniff the wire in promiscuous mode, hehehe. > > what else perturbs the entropy pool? disk access? :-)
O'Reilly's "Linux Kernel Development" (see http://safari.oreilly.com/0672327201/app02), gives an example that the keyboard interrupt is an entropy source. But it's not complete :( I like the work of Zvi Gutterman, Benny Pinkas & Tzachy Reinman (Analysis of the Linux Random Number Generator, 06Mar2006) which says that "In a PC environment, the LRNG collects entropy from events originating from the keyboard, mouse, disk and system interrupts. When such an event occurs, two 32-bit words are used as input to the entropy pools. The first word encodes the timing of the event in jiffies (namely, the number of milliseconds from the time the machine was booted) or in cpu-cycles granularity (currently cpu-cycles granularity is only used on SMP). The second word encodes the event type. For example, in case of a keyboard event the word encodes the key that was pressed." --So that's the reason why I was disappointed when I couldn't make when I couldn't easily make /dev/random generation any faster. You see, I've been running the Rainbow Crack's rtgen for a few weeks now, 100% utilization non-stop by the 4 rtgen's individually bound to each of my 4 Intel CPUs... I had the imagination that maybe the LNRG takes entropy bits from a hot resistor somewhere (and amplifies the voltage to generate the undeterministic bits) but I see I was off the beaten track there. Drexx Laggui -- CISA, CISSP, CFE Associate, CCSI, CSA http://www.laggui.com ( Singapore / Manila / California ) Computer forensics; Penetration testing; QMS & ISMS developers; K-Transfer PGP fingerprint = 6E62 A089 E3EA 1B93 BFB4 8363 FFEC 3976 FF31 8A4E _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
