[9362] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: chip-level randomness?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Pawel Krawczyk)
Mon Sep 17 15:37:49 2001
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 20:57:16 +0200
From: Pawel Krawczyk <kravietz@aba.krakow.pl>
To: Carl Ellison <cme@acm.org>
Cc: cryptography@wasabisystems.com
Message-ID: <20010917205716.A370@aba.krakow.pl>
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On Sat, Sep 15, 2001 at 10:16:27AM -0700, Carl Ellison wrote:
> I'm told that the LINUX 2.4 kernel comes with the RNG driver
> built-in, but I haven't tried that.
It works almost out of box, kernel detects the chip and if you have the
necessary device file created (character 10,183 AFAIK) you can use it to
read random data streams. It blocks sometimes when you read long blocks,
but it's quite obvious and it returns as soon as it collects enough data
to satisfy your request. What is important, it *doesn't* feed the built-in
Linux kernel PRNG available in /dev/urandom and /dev/random, so you have
either to only use the hardware generator or feed /dev/urandom yourself.
--
Paweł Krawczyk *** home: <http://ceti.pl/~kravietz/>
security: <http://ipsec.pl/> *** fidonet: 2:486/23
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