Persisting /dev/random state across reboots

[Thomas]

Am Donnerstag 29 Juli 2010, 21:47:01 schrieb Richard Salz:
> At shutdown, a process copies /dev/random to /var/random-seed which is
> used on reboots.
> Is this a good, bad, or "shrug, whatever" idea?
> I suppose the idea is that "all startup procs look the same" ?

Indeed. The boot process of a machine is very deterministic
and if you do not have any Hardware RNG you need to seed
/dev/random.
At least old Linux kernels (2.4) also overestimate the entropy
in the pool by about 30% which is especially a problem when you
generate ssh host keys during system installation.

Bye
Thomas


-- 
 Thomas Biege <thomas at suse.de>, SUSE LINUX, Security Support & Auditing
 SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg)
--
  Wer aufhoert besser werden zu wollen, hoert auf gut zu sein.
                            -- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

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