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

Theodore Tso
2007-12-08T23:48:27Z

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