[Cryptography] provisioning a seed for /dev/urandom

Bill Frantz frantz at pwpconsult.com
Sat Oct 26 23:11:00 EDT 2013


On 10/26/13 at 12:49 PM, radix42 at gmail.com (David Mercer) wrote:

>Note that on many (most?) data center grade rackmount servers you don't
>HAVE an audio port at all to run something like turbid against.

Pity. All that fan noise should make a good random source.

In all seriousness though, you can cut costs so far that you can 
no longer implement a security architecture that depends on 
cryptographic random numbers. If you need that kind of 
architecture, then pay for a random source. Retrofitting a USB 
dongle might be the cheapest solution for existing hardware. A 
random source should be a required feature for new hardware 
which will run applications requiring cryptographic random numbers.

Cheers - Bill

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