Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 16 May 2008 14:59:03 +0100 | From | "Will Newton" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] drivers/net: remove network drivers' last few uses of IRQF_SAMPLE_RANDOM |
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On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 2:40 PM, Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org> wrote: > Lennart Sorensen wrote: >> >> On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 03:21:49PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote: >>> >>> "no other form of entropy"? See examples in this thread. >> >> So where does one get entropy if not the ethernet adapter on many >> embedded systems? If you have no mouse, no keyboard, no hardware number >> generator, just ethernet ports and a serial console that usually >> receives no input. While ethernet might not be preferable if you have >> something else, sometimes you really don't have anything else. > > Already answered in this thread... EGD illustrates how many sources of > entropy remain, even in the example you just gave. > > Further, you do not want to rely on entropy from a source that declines just > as network traffic increases.
I don't know egd that well, but from a cursory look it gets data from such things as w or last (wtmp) which is static on most embedded boxes. It also uses netstat and snmp - surely this is at least as easy to manipulate as interrupt timings? I'm not a cryptographer by any means but it looks as if it works by magic. Last changed 2002, written in perl. No, I don't think I'll be shipping this on any systems any time soon.
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