[17911] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 8.3.29: X
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Jun 14 15:44:17 2000
Message-Id: <200006141944.PAA24074@small-gods.mit.edu>
To: Karl Ramm <kcr@1ts.org>
Cc: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>, John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>,
amu@MIT.EDU (Aaron M. Ucko), bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "14 Jun 2000 15:33:28 EDT."
<uusn1konjlj.fsf@ORTHANC.MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2000 15:44:10 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> There's this thing called the 'entropy gathering daemon' a.k.a
> egd.pl that simulates /dev/random on a machine without one. Also,
> there is a add on package that you can get from sun (but which is
> damnably hard to figure out the name of from the net) that supplies
> a /dev/random.
These are interesting. I'm not sure if I really want to bring egd.pl
and thus perl into the xlogin code path, or install an add-on package
which isn't available through the normal support routes, but they are
options.
> Anyway, given the lack of a /dev/random on suns, can you trust ssh keys
> generated on them?
ssh-keygen makes its own attempt to gather entropy, although I'm not
convinced it gets much real entropy in the absence of /dev/random.
(It uses ps output, "ls -alni /tmp" output, w output, and some netstat
output as noise, /dev/random information if it's available, and
several forms of the current time.) So, "not especially."
