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

From: Theodore Tso
Date: Sat Dec 08 2007 - 18:48:29 EST


On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 09:42:39PM +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> I remember having installed openssh on an AIX machines years ago, and
> being amazed by the number of sources it collected entropy from. Simple
> commands such as "ifconfig -a", "netstat -i" and "du -a", "ps -ef", "w"
> provided a lot of entropy.

Well.... not as many bits of entropy as you might think. But every
little bit helps, especially if some of it is not available to
adversary.

- Ted
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