Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 18 Aug 2002 01:18:02 -0500 | From | Oliver Xymoron <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] (0/4) Entropy accounting fixes |
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On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 10:05:49PM -0700, Dmitri wrote: > > Wouldn't it be much easier to ask -very few- people (GnuPG/SSL/SSH teams > primarily) to use /dev/super-reliable-mathematically-proven-random if > available, instead of asking much larger crowd to hack their code?
Most people (including OpenSSH!) are already using /dev/urandom where appropriate.
If you care about the difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom, then you ought to care about the difference _actually being there_. If your entropy estimates are not conservative, then your system will leak entropy faster than it takes it in and then /dev/random and /dev/urandom will by identical _by definition_.
> This will be backward compatible, and at the same time offers a much > better randomness for those who care about it. Myself, I read > 128-bit session keys for multiple, not-so-secure, short connections > from /dev/random and it would be sad if it runs out of data.
Why would that be sad? It's at least billions of times easier to break a 128-bit key than to guess the internal state of /dev/urandom, even if the system has no entropy sources.
> Also, /dev/random may take data from /dev/super-...random until it sucks > it dry, and then switches to less secure sources. This will guarantee that > the enthropy of readings is -not worse than-, and for moderate requests is > much better.
Simple enough:
mv /dev/random /dev/super-random ln -s /dev/urandom /dev/random
Backward compatible and everything.
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