Re: Entropy Pool Contents

[Theodore Tso]

On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 01:10:08AM +0100, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> Disk activities are "somewhat predictable", like network traffic, and 
> hence are not (or should not - have not checked it) contribute to the 
> pool. Note that urandom is the device which _always_ gives you data, and 
> when the pool is exhausted, returns pseudorandom data.

Plesae read the following article before making such assertions:

	D. Davis, R. Ihaka, P.R. Fenstermacher, "Cryptographic
	Randomness from Air Turbulence in Disk Drives", in Advances in
	Cryptology -- CRYPTO '94 Conference Proceedings, edited by Yvo
	G. Desmedt, pp.114--120. Lecture Notes in Computer Science
	#839. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1994.
	http://world.std.com/~dtd/random/forward.ps

Regards,

						- Ted

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/