[5131] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: depleting the random number generator
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Russell Nelson)
Sun Jul 18 06:25:57 1999
From: Russell Nelson <nelson@crynwr.com>
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 1999 23:34:28 -0400 (EDT)
To: cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <4.1.19990717161153.00ad0850@surfcity.research.att.com>
John Denker writes:
> The bad part is that Whitney has already gobbled up quite a few
> bits of entropy from /dev/random before the slightest bit of
> authentication is attempted.
You're presuming that you're using the standard Linux version of
/dev/random. You could quite easily write a driver for that serial
port white noise generator which was discussed earlier on this list.
Make it's operation compatible with /dev/random, and replace
/dev/random with a node pointing to your device.
--
-russ nelson <rn-sig@crynwr.com> http://crynwr.com/~nelson
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