The perils of security tools

[Simon Josefsson]

Taral <taralx at gmail.com> writes:

> On 5/26/08, Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org> wrote:
>>  For example, reading a lot of data from linux's /dev/urandom will
>>  deplete the entropy pool in the kernel, which effectively makes reads
>>  from /dev/random stall.  The two devices uses the same entropy pool.
>
> That's a bug in the way the kernel hands out entropy to multiple
> concurrent consumers. I don't think it's a semantic issue.

Do you have any references?  Several people have brought this up before
and have been told that the design with depleting the entropy pool is
intentional.

Still, the semantics of /dev/*random is not standardized anywhere, and
the current implementation is sub-optimal from a practical point of
view, so I think we are far away from an even OK situation.

/Simon

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