entropy gathering (was Re: Why does reading from /dev/urandom depleteentropy so much?)

From: Jeff Garzik
Date: Sat Dec 08 2007 - 14:37:32 EST



As an aside...

Speaking as the maintainer rng-tools, which is the home of the hardware RNG entropy gathering daemon...

I wish somebody (not me) would take rngd and several other projects, and combine them into a single actively maintained "entropy gathering" package.

IMO entropy gathering has been a long-standing need for headless network servers (and now virtual machines).

In addition to rngd for hardware RNGs, I've been daemons out there that gather from audio and video sources (generally open wires/channels with nothing plugged in), thermal sources, etc. There is a lot of entropy that could be gathered via userland, if you think creatively.

Jeff



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