Re: [PATCH] API for true Random Number Generators to add entropy (2.6.11)

Evgeniy Polyakov
2005-03-29T10:48:57Z

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On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 20:30 +1000, Herbert Xu wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 12:21:04PM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> >
> > What catastrophic consequences? Noone is likely to even *notice*, and
> > it does not help practical attack at all. Unless hardware RNGs are
> > *very* flakey (like, more flakey than harddrives), this is not a problem.
>
> The reason some people use hardware RNGs in the first place is because
> they don't trust the software RNGs. When the hardware RNG fails but
> continues to send data to /dev/random, /dev/random essentially degenerates
> into a software RNG. Now granted /dev/random is a pretty good software
> RNG, however, for some purposes it just isn't good enough.

I think the most people use hardware accelerated devices to
speed up theirs calculations - embedded world is the best example -
applications that are written to use /dev/random
will work just too slow, so hardware vendors
place HW assistant chips to unload that very cpu-intencive work
from main CPU.
Without ability speed this up in kernel, we completely [ok, almost]
loose all RNG advantages.

--
Evgeniy Polyakov

Crash is better than data corruption -- Arthur Grabowski

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