Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Mon, 13 May 1996 13:09:19 -0400 | From | "Theodore Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: CONFIG_RANDOM option for 1.99.2 |
| |
From: Paul Gortmaker <gpg109@rsphy6.anu.edu.au> Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 14:51:21 +1000 (EST)
The random device is a fairly useful thing to have (I use it for input values to "crashme" ;-) but there lots of people who don't use it for anything. For those people, it would be useful to have a CONFIG_RANDOM option, so that they can save a bit of space, and avoid the small overhead associated with all the add_XXX_randomness() calls.
The original reason I didn't provide a CONFIG_RANDOM was because I wanted security-oriented applications (i.e., Netscape, PGP, Kerberos, etc.) to be able to assume that if they were on Linux, /dev/linux would always be present. Good, secure numbers are absolutely vital for programs that rely on cryptography. The most secure encryption system in the world is useless if the attacker can guess the random numbers you used to generate your crypto keys....
Note that if you just need input values to "crashme", a non-cryptographically secure random number generator would be all that you need.
The random driver also isn't all that big, and the overhead of the add_XXX_randomness() calls were designed to be as small as possible.
- Ted
|  |