Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Tue, 8 Aug 2000 20:15:40 +0200 | | From | "Andi Kleen" <> | | Subject | Re: /dev/random blocks forever on 2.2.12 and 2.2.16 |
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On Tue, Aug 08, 2000 at 01:54:08PM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > Date: Tue, 8 Aug 2000 19:42:39 +0200 > From: "Andi Kleen" <ak@suse.de> > > That wouldn't happen when you were using a secure PRNG to select the > interrupts to get data from, or ? You just have to make sure that the > PRNG initial state is not seeded from the network or anything else the > attacker could guess. > > Well, the question I thought that was being asked was why wasn't the > interrupts from NIC's feeding in entropy by default into the /dev/random > pool. > > I'm not sure what you mean about using a secure PRNG to select the > interrupts to get data from; there's a bootstrapping issue here, and
You would need a master key. Still better than no random numbers on a diskless server.
> even if you do use a PRNG to select whether or not a particular entropy > is sampled, that decision only contributes one bit of entropy into the > pool.....
One bit ? I was assuming you always put in in the time difference between interrupts, which is surely a lot more than one bit (when it is there or not) Alternatively you could just run a Stream cipher over the input, but I guess that requires too much trust for the outgoing hash (just like the prng)
-Andi
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