[5336] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: linux-ipsec: /dev/random
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Tue Aug 3 19:25:33 1999
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 18:55:48 +0200 (CEST)
From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
To: linux-ipsec@clinet.fi, cryptography@c2.net
John> The point is that there are a lot of customers out there who
John> aren't ready to run out and acquire the well-designed hardware
John> TRNG that you alluded to. So we need to think carefully about
John> the gray area between the strong-but-really-expensive solution
John> and the cheap-but-really-lame proposals. The gray area is big
John> and important.
Of course Intel is putting a TRNG onto its chip sets already, and these
will probably be widely available in the future. This thing produces
massive quantities of true entropy, more than even John could need,
and it has been reviewed by one of the sharpest guys in the business,
Paul Kocher (see review at www.cryptography.com).
Maybe the real solution here is to work more closely with Intel to
provide some kind of open source access to this RNG. An associate who
attended one of Intel's corporate briefings on the chip indicated that
the question of Linux came up, and Intel expressed a desire to find some
solution for that market. They want people to use this chip, and Linux
is an increasingly important part of the landscape for them.
