chip-level randomness?

[Pawel Krawczyk]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 01:44:57PM -0700, Bram Cohen wrote:

> > 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.
> That's so ... stupid. Why go through all the work of making the thing run
> and then leave it unplugged?

It's not that stupid, as feeding the PRNG from i810_rng at the kernel
level would be resource intensive, not necessary in general case and
would require to invent some defaults without any reasonable arguments
to rely on. Like how often to feed the PRNG, with how much data etc.

On the other hand, the authors provide a `rngd' daemon, running in
userland, that reads the i810_rng device and feeds the data into kernel
PRNG. It seems to be reasonably written, with all the possible caveats
in mind, and you can control the feeding interval, block size and other
parameters.

URI: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3242&release_id=28349

-- 
Paweł Krawczyk *** home: <http://ceti.pl/~kravietz/>
security: <http://ipsec.pl/>  *** fidonet: 2:486/23



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