Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 2 Jun 1999 13:08:21 +1000 (EST) | From | Damien Miller <> | Subject | Re: /dev/random and /dev/psaux: too much entropy assumed? |
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On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
> my point was more subtle: it is your responsibility to verify that the > uses you put /dev/random to are appropriate. monte-carlo integration and > n-body simulations are *not* kernel issues and thus *not* appropriate for > linux-kernel. attacks on tcp sequence numbers *are* kernel issues, but no > one has ever claimed that statistical uniformity was relevant here.
It is relevant:
from drivers/char/random.c:
* This routine gathers environmental noise from device drivers, etc., * and returns good random numbers, suitable for cryptographic use. * Besides the obvious cryptographic uses, these numbers are also good * for seeding TCP sequence numbers, and other places where it is * desirable to have numbers which are not only random, but hard to * predict by an attacker.
and
* The two other interfaces are two character devices /dev/random and * /dev/urandom. /dev/random is suitable for use when very high * quality randomness is desired (for example, for key generation or * one-time pads), as it will only return a maximum of the number of
/dev/random is explicitly designed for use by user-space cryptography software. If its collection and entrophy estimation is erroneous then it is a bug which should be fixed where it happens - in the driver.
Regards, Damien Miller
-- | "Bombay is 250ms from New York in the new world order" - Alan Cox | Damien Miller - http://www.ilogic.com.au/~dmiller | Email: dmiller@ilogic.com.au (home) -or- damien@ibs.com.au (work)
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