[8053] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Lots of random numbers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rich Salz)
Thu Nov 16 15:26:46 2000
Message-ID: <3A135259.A07F409F@caveosystems.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 22:19:53 -0500
From: Rich Salz <rsalz@caveosystems.com>
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I'm putting together a system that might need to generate thousands of RSA
keypairs per day, using OpenSSL on a "handful" of Linux machines. What do
folks think of the following: take one machine and dedicate it as an entropy
source. After 'n' seconds turn the network card into promiscuous mode, scoop
up packets and hash them, dump them into the entropy pool. Do this for 'm'
seconds, then go back to sleep for awhile. The sleep and wake times are
random numbers. Other systems on the newtwork periodically make an SSL
connection to the entropy box, read bytes, and dump it into their /dev/random
device.
Is this a cute hack, pointless, or a good idea?
/r$
