[42542] in Cypherpunks
Re: /dev/random for FreeBSD [was: Re: /dev/random for Linux]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Shields)
Mon Oct 30 17:57:12 1995
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Date: 30 Oct 1995 22:37:45 -0000
From: shields@tembel.org (Michael Shields)
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In article <199510301925.VAA27116@grumble.grondar.za>,
Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za> wrote:
> Something I didn't mention earlier; we felt that letting the unwashed
> masses read /dev/*random was not a good idea, as they could deplete
> the pool of entropy all to easily for attack purposes.
That's really just a DOS attack, isn't it? An application that needs
true randomness should be using /dev/random, which you can slow but not
disturb, and an application that is using /dev/urandom should be ok with
less than full entropy.
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--
Shields.
